How To Time Travel: A Technical Manual

stars teach how to time travel
by Anna Spence
Evolution

Behind us, the rainclouds are climbing over one another at the horizon and the sky is water-green above the burnished savanna. You grip my neck for balance when you heave your bulk upright and break the surface of the dry sea of hissing grass. Your eyes, hooded under heavy brows, are keen and good at judging distances so that, when the panther pounces, we’re no longer there.

Digestion

Your library has become a home for swallows. At dusk they are silhouetted trajectories against the dust-opaqued panes of the vast windows, a tracery of hunting. I see that your journal has been a meal for a bookworm who has contentedly chewed a tunnel from your first days at university, through the terseness of wartime rationing, all the way to the last unfinished sentence begun just as the sky fell. Did the worm find those last words delicious? Did they taste of smoke or of the daisy pressed flat between the leaves?

Suspense

The train rocks on its tracks while the world outside is pulled backward, past-past, past-past the clock-hand sweep of plough-furrowed fields, the ticking of fence posts, a kid with a dog running on a dirt road that slides like a treadmill under their feet, the disappointed dopplering of signal bells. When the sun sets you rest your temple on your cool reflection and sleep under my coat. The train’s headlights alchemize rails from darkness.

Entanglement

You turn to look at me before I call your name.

Faith

From Alpha Centauri, I can see you waving, a lightspeed echo already four years gone. Now, tired of looking at old light, you’ve put away your telescope and are kneeling in the wet grass, pressing tulip bulbs into black soil, suns for a future season.


Anna Spence is an academic by day and a writer by compulsion. Follow her on Twitter @MSSalieri.

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