Too Little, Too Late

Red sand, hot enough to steam (he'd swear to it) creates an unfathomable vastness before him. It's endless, the desert rolling arid landscape for a million miles. For as far as he or anyone else will ever see. It's red and it's hot, and if he didn't know any better, he'd swear to it not even being planet earth.

Years ago, or yesterday (he can’t recall which, isn’t sure it matters; time is a human construct and it stopped holding meaning the day this all started), clocks began moving backward. Timelines tangling and intertwining, an experiment in control spinning and spiralling into catastrophe.

Time was their most valuable resource, their only viable option for stopping the earth (the real one, the one he was born onto) from imploding inward on itself.

They missed the mark.

Grasping at straws and grappling with an elusive enemy – manmade environmental decline – they missed the mark.

In an act of desperation, too little, too late, the time-turning lockets hit the market en masse.

When he holds it, when he wraps filth-ridden fingers around the fine design, the shifting stops.

Worlds cease to collide.

The second it falls from his hold, chaos ensues, unbound. Sometimes it feels like falling and other times it’s the force of a freight train hitting hard against the cavity of his chest. Sometimes it’s pleasant, and though the calm is fleeting, he’s learned to embrace the peace whenever possible.

Once, he held onto the heart-shaped locket for long enough to remain in one timeline for a week. Paranoia coursing through his system each time he tried to sleep and the surrounding world one full to the brim with unknowns: double-headed deer and homes made only of the bones collected by predators. But for a week, once, the shifting had stilled. The unknown of one world seemed incomparable to the endless unknowns of wherever he may end up next.

Until the locket slipped.

Exhaustion overcame his failing form, eyelids heavy with the weight of lingering anxiety, and his palm opened up. Each digit losing its strength, one after the other after the other, until the tarnished gold piece tumbled downward. In some timelines, the earth itself acted the same: each continent, having grown heavy with the exhaustion imposed by humanity, succumbed to an end beneath the ocean.

And then the shift: the universe colliding with one parallel to it, subtle changes morphing into stark contrasts as he continued to transition from one timeline to the next, to the next.

He’s been in this place for a day before he opens his locket, cautious in the motions. A picture of his wife, youthful and bright back in her early days, stares back at him with a smile. Where is she now?

Every jump forces him further into loneliness, further away from a reality that made sense.

He’s been in this next place for some time (the length doesn’t matter, not in the grand scheme of things) and he opens the locket to find the image of a child. A boy, his son, though by now he doesn’t remember the baby’s name. Can’t recall which time or space he existed in, or whether he ever had the chance to be stagnant and sure of his surroundings.

Next time, it’s his wife.

After that, it’s a pet cat he’s sure he never touched with his own two hands.

He stops opening the locket to look inside when he’s sure it’ll only incite grief or grave confusion. The faces within are loved ones lost or long forgotten, and he’s dispelled the notion of ever going back to find them or make some attempt to stay in one place. It used to be that he dreamed of just a moment in the same timeline as his wife, just long enough for a stroke of her cheek or a glance up at a shared night sky.

All the constellations now go unrecognised; he can’t recall the last time the map of the sky made any sense. Galaxies shift with each switch, relationships between moons and planets making trade-offs in the transition.

Now, Europa belongs to Mercury.

Now, Pluto is a moon of Saturn.

Now, the Milky Way doesn’t even exist.

Two timelines collide and he finds himself standing in a scorching desert, sun beating down hotter than it ever has on Nevada or Sudan. One hand reaches for the locket dangling around his neck like a noose. He reaches for it as a lifeline, like the tall, cold glass of water his parched throat is begging for.

The shifting stops momentarily, the burning metal in his palm providing some semblance of relief. Of control. It’s a reprieve until he realises it isn’t. There’s no way out of this mess they endeavoured to create, and he’s slowly come to accept the insanity of it. Come to anticipate the world turning itself inside out and spitting him into another dimension.

It’s his fate.

A fate he earned with every misstep and each whispered word of ignorance.

Time was their most valuable resource, and they harnessed it in only the wrong ways. Mankind's mistakes could not be unmade. The bell was rung and would not acquiesce to silence, and still no one listened.

He's listening now, too late. He's listening now, and there's nothing left to hear. So he drops the locket.

Succumbs to the consequences.