A Timely Intervention
by Alasdair McPherson
Genre: Fantasy/Sci-fi
Swearwords: None.
Description: A time travel romance.
_____________________________________________________________________
Let’s get it straight right from the start: it’s probably my fault. It usually is! Ruth says I have no empathy. It’s not that I don’t care about people, it’s just that I don’t seem to notice that they need care. Relationships are particularly difficult for me.
For example, Ruth is a sort of daughter-in-law because she was married to my son, except that he is only my son by adoption. I married his mum and she left him behind when she moved away twenty years ago so I brought him up on my own from the age of thirteen.
I’m very much better at science than with people. I can see forces but I was an adult before I realised how unusual it was to be able to do that – when you can do something without conscious thought you think it must be an every-day characteristic shared with the bulk of humanity. Newton observed that forces cause things to move and there are a set of mathematical equations that allow you to calculate how far and how fast an object will move if you apply a force.
I don’t have to work out the equations: I can see the forces and I know how the object I’m looking at will behave. The only time the gift has been of public value was once when a driver lost control of his car on an icy road and I was able to pull a pram carrying an infant to a safe area – I knew, you see, exactly the trajectory the car would take.
It’s not clever, what I do, but simply something that exists in my mind without any effort on my part. I worked really hard at University and scraped a 2.1 honours degree. I had no dependants and I had a small income so I just stayed on at University to get a master’s degree and, eventually, a doctorate. I worked very hard at everything and I had been about the department for so many years that they offered me a job.
I became a lecturer but I wasn’t very good at it – no empathy, I suppose. I was very good at practical things and I drifted into working with students in the laboratory. By the time I had my thirty-ninth birthday I was Head Demonstrator, responsible for the running of the practical laboratories for the whole department. My life was calm and untroubled. I was happy enough to talk to people when I had to but I didn’t seek their company and I certainly didn’t let anyone get close to me.
Everything changed when a demonstrator called me to deal with a hysterical female student. Her story was all too common: as a fresher she became pregnant by a fellow student and the pair set up home together to raise the baby boy. She had skipped a year for the birth and she was only now beginning her final year. The father of her child had graduated in the summer and now he had gone off somewhere to pursue his career overseas free from responsibility for both his son and his student’s loan.
Knowing nothing about women, I was appalled that the girl, Jenny, had been treated so badly. Her family had disowned her at the time of her pregnancy and she was probably going to be forced out of University before she could graduate. I had not long moved into my present home and I offered her the upstairs bedrooms and bathroom for the use of her and two year old James. This rush of blood to my normally cool head continued and within a month of meeting Jenny I had proposed marriage and had been accepted.
She was twenty-one, eighteen years my junior, when we settled down to play happy families, except that she was never perceptibly happy for long. I tried to deal with her misgivings one by one, starting with adopting James to secure his future if anything should happen to her. I settled some money on her and made a will in her favour but these things only settled her for a few weeks or months before another difficulty occupied her thoughts – and dominated our conversations!
As time went on we stopped talking to each other and lived apart within the same four walls. She bought a partnership in a little café and I took to making the meals for James and me. We became great friends and spent most of our time together until, that is, he reached puberty and became predictably horrible. I had no idea how to deal with this familiar-looking stranger and Jenny dealt with the problem by packing all her belongings and abandoning James and me.
I know nothing about parenting but it seems to me that James was given a very raw deal by his mother. Puberty is surely the time when the child takes centre stage in the family, working out his angst in a warm and stable environment. Jenny’s departure spoiled his big scene and I think it was the reason why he never truly recovered from puberty. He grew up to be Peter Pan with attitude. Apart from the effect on James the only change caused by Jenny’s departure was that I had to find someone to do the ironing – that had been her only contribution to the housekeeping.
Over the years I had exploited my ability to see forces to invent a couple of gadgets that were now bringing in enough to enable me to leave my University post to be a house-father to my adopted son. Not that my presence made any difference to James’ behaviour. I was fifty when his mother left and a successful inventor but he treated me most of the time as if he was the adult and I was the child – and a rather backward child at that!
My chief value was as the provider of cash not only to keep us in comfort but also to provide sums on demand. He became vociferously abusive in his demands and I became stubbornly unyielding. He would not work at school considering his role in life was to spend the wealth of others. At twenty-two he was an assistant in the clothing department of a store; although he kept it well-hidden at home, he was capable of being very charming. If he had been prepared to back it with hard work he could have been a success.
I had noticed an improvement in his behaviour for some weeks before he brought home a pretty young girl to meet me. Ruth was wonderful then and she becomes more wonderful with every passing year. They rented a flat and moved in together within months of meeting. James got a promotion at work and he and I got back to an understanding that we had lost almost ten years before.
He and Ruth had a baby and decided that they would marry when she was pregnant with their second child. I put up the deposit for a house for them and I paid all the legal and removal expenses. I was disappointed that they turned down the offer to live with me in the old house but I understood that young people need time on their own. James was coy about telling me how much he earned but he insisted that he would pay the mortgage on the home he shared with Ruth.
I enjoyed my time with the kids. I would babysit them and Ruth would ask me to go with her and the boys to the zoo and places like that. I liked going shopping with her where I would buy them shoes or little outfits; I had never done anything like that before, even when James was a baby. He seldom joined us on our excursions and I took selfish pleasure in having Ruth to myself. She is bright and funny and I laugh more in a single afternoon with her than I did in a month before I got to know her.
I wasn’t neglecting my work at this time. There were still some mechanical inventions that I sold but I had become obsessed with movement within a fixed time frame. The forces I see affecting solid objects begin from the moment I start looking – the starting time is always zero. It is easy for me to see the big forces but I have to strain my mental eye to spot little forces. Everyone quotes the storm in central Asia arising from the fluttering of butterfly wings in the Andes. In real life the minor forces tend to cancel each other out.
With time things are different. I quickly discovered a way to anchor time so that I could start calculations from any chosen point in time. I can nudge things back or forward in time by a few minutes for a few seconds but the further I move away from now and the longer I stay in the past or future the more the minor forces come into play. Unlike mechanical forces and movement in space, the minor temporal forces do not cancel out. Without the equations it is hard to explain but the outcome is that moving in time adds to my age.
If I go one day into the future and return immediately I will be 2.3 seconds older; an observer in my lab would see me return in the blink of an eye but my body would be older. To go ten years forward I would come back over a minute older. The result of staying in the past or future is even more aging. A ten minute stay one day in the future will age me by a total of 6.9 seconds – 2.3 for distance and 4.6 for duration. Both effects rise exponentially so long trips in either direction or stys of more than a few hours would be fatal to the traveller.
I have sent pot plants ten years into the future and brought them back healthy but I have missed some effect when going back in time so I have only managed to retrieve withered plants until now.
I was sitting quietly looking at forces in my mind to identify the ones I had so far missed when the door burst open and Ruth came in very distressed. Both she and James have keys for my house. I was very close to being disappointed to see her because I had just uncovered a possible force and I wanted peace and quiet to examine it.
Even with my lack of empathy I could tell that something was seriously wrong. My thoughts immediately leapt to the health of the boys and James but Ruth put my mind at ease by saying the problems were financial. James has not been paying the mortgage and has been suppressing the increasingly pressing demands from his mortgage lender. Ruth had been into the local branch of the lender before she came to see me.
James had not only failed to pay the mortgage, he had failed to respond to the letters sent to him. The bank had foreclosed and would not consider any other solution. Ruth had left the boys with a neighbour so I ran her home and while she collected the kids I went to talk to my son. James told me to mind my own business and went upstairs locking himself in his bedroom. I went out and talked Ruth into letting me take the boys to my house while we sorted something out.
The boys were a bit fractious, picking up, I suppose, the tension in the adults. Once we had them settled, Ruth drove back to talk to her husband. All she found was a note from James telling her she would be better off without him. When I later inquired at his place of work it became clear that my son had not only followed the example of his mum, he had taken with him the mortgage money and the shop manager’s secretary!
I was sixty-seven when James left. Ruth and the boys moved in with me until we could find a long term solution to her problems. That was the beginning of the first family life I’ve ever enjoyed. It was a delight to have the boys around the place and Ruth was simply marvellous. She insisted on paying her way be undertaking all the cooking and housekeeping, but the most important thing was that she was interesting to talk to. I can’t remember ever having a conversation with Jenny that went beyond money and her need for it.
As an old man I started to do fatherly things like school runs and bedtime stories. I suppose that is a good experience when it happens at twenty but can you imagine the added joy when you have waited sixty-seven years? For the first time since I moved into the property I failed to enter my laboratory in the basement for a full week. All thoughts of my latest experiment were forgotten in the pleasure of family life.
It wasn’t long before the serpent slithered under my bedroom door to disturb my night-time thoughts. I was behaving like a father and Ruth is a mother so I let myself wonder if she and I could get closer. I know she likes me and enjoys my company; we’re together practically every waking hour but there is still a yawning gulf of forty years between our ages. The boys began to ask if I had fallen out with their mum when I tried to solve the problem by distancing myself.
I know kids have to learn to survive in a cruel world but I was not prepared to hurt them through any action of mine. Old habits are very hard to break so I returned to my lab and tried to solve the problem of going back in time The stray thought that had flashed through my mind when Ruth burst in with the news of James’ scandalous behaviour had matured in the time since – it had formed perhaps because I ignored it and let my subconscious do the work.
My family were unperturbed by my preoccupation, since even the younger boy recognises that I become driven from time to time. I already had potted plants returning alive from an excursion into the past although they got back barely alive with leaves shrivelled and petals lost. I could see what had to be done to remove the final barrier. I was still enjoying my time with my family and I was becoming exhausted since I worked through most nights on my time machine after I had spent a fulfilled and happy day with Ruth and the boys.
I napped on a chaise lounge in the lab more often than not and it was there in the very early hours of one morning that I had my brainwave. I couldn’t move mass permanently through time but on checking and re-checking the mathematics I could see no reason why the object that returned had to be the one that was sent. If I swapped a plant I sent into the future with one grown in the future the equations wouldn’t be violated.
It was clear that I could do nothing to reduce my age but my plan was to go back twenty years and send forward me as I was then. I reckon with only a twenty year difference in our ages I could convince Ruth to become my partner in every sense. I like to think that I’ve mellowed with age but basically I would be swapping like for like. If my age is the only thing that’s stopping Ruth then she should be happy enough with the younger me.
I was regularly sending plants back through twenty years with improving results. The petals would still fall during the journey through time but the leaves remained attached and would perk up with a little attention. I was sure that I could convince my younger self to make the trip but I was deeply troubled about what would happen to me without my wonderful boys and their wonderful mother. It was a lot to give up but I felt I owed it to all of them.
Ruth had been particularly affectionate since I made up my mind to go back. It was as if she sensed that I would soon be gone and was storing up memories for me to live on for the rest of my life. I memorised her address when she was five, the age she would be when the swap was complete. I had some daft ideas about becoming a teacher in her school just to be close to her.
We had a wonderful evening together and she kissed me on the cheek when she went up to bed telling me not to work too hard. I sat on in the lounge with a paper and pen composing an explanation of what I was about to do. If there was no one in the lab in the morning I wanted her to know that I’d not deserted her but that I was only trying to make her life better. I got a bit carried away, to tell you the truth, speaking openly of my feelings for her and how I would have courted her if I had only been twenty years younger.
I waited until I was she sure she would be asleep and then I pushed the letter under her door. It was the first love letter that I’d ever written and I regretted imposing my feelings on her almost as soon as the envelope disappeared under the door. I tried to pull it back but I couldn’t get a grip. I considered opening the door to retrieve it but I was sure that would wake her up. In the end I decided that I’d leave it since I wouldn’t be about to see her reaction!
Downstairs I sent a final pot plant through to check all was well and then I got into my travel suit. I discovered very early in the experiments that synthetic fibres do not travel unchanged through time. I had bought an all-wool onesy from Finland and a local seamstress replaced the thread with pure cotton. The trouble with wool is that it goes out of shape very quickly. The onesy was baggy at the elbows and knees but especially over my backside so I looked as if I was wearing a nappy.
I was waiting for the geranium to get back when the lab door was thrust open to reveal Ruth in a dressing gown with her hair standing on end and her face white as a ghost. It took a second for me to realise that the colour was due to a liberal covering of cold cream. She had my letter scrunched up in her right hand and, as she came closer, she started to beat me on the chest with it.
“You stupid, stupid man! I love you, not some science fiction version from your past. You’ve not the least smidgen of empathy in your entire body. If you had you’d have known that I’ve been dropping hints ever since we moved in.”
I was standing where she found me in my sleep-suit completely out of my depth but I began to feel solid ground under my feet when Ruth stopped hitting me and threw her arms round my neck. I let instinct take over at that point and found her lips with mine. I tried several times to disengage while I explained that I wasn’t worthy of her but she silenced me every time with her delicious mouth. She took me to her bedroom eventually only insisting that I dump the onesy outside the door.
It turns out that age isn’t the most important thing in a relationship. I plan to spend the rest of my life convincing Ruth that she made the right choice.
The next morning I went down to tidy the lab and found the geranium I had sent into the past in the time machine had returned with its flowers blooming and its leaves glossy.
Swearwords: None.
Description: A time travel romance.
_____________________________________________________________________
Let’s get it straight right from the start: it’s probably my fault. It usually is! Ruth says I have no empathy. It’s not that I don’t care about people, it’s just that I don’t seem to notice that they need care. Relationships are particularly difficult for me.
For example, Ruth is a sort of daughter-in-law because she was married to my son, except that he is only my son by adoption. I married his mum and she left him behind when she moved away twenty years ago so I brought him up on my own from the age of thirteen.
I’m very much better at science than with people. I can see forces but I was an adult before I realised how unusual it was to be able to do that – when you can do something without conscious thought you think it must be an every-day characteristic shared with the bulk of humanity. Newton observed that forces cause things to move and there are a set of mathematical equations that allow you to calculate how far and how fast an object will move if you apply a force.
I don’t have to work out the equations: I can see the forces and I know how the object I’m looking at will behave. The only time the gift has been of public value was once when a driver lost control of his car on an icy road and I was able to pull a pram carrying an infant to a safe area – I knew, you see, exactly the trajectory the car would take.
It’s not clever, what I do, but simply something that exists in my mind without any effort on my part. I worked really hard at University and scraped a 2.1 honours degree. I had no dependants and I had a small income so I just stayed on at University to get a master’s degree and, eventually, a doctorate. I worked very hard at everything and I had been about the department for so many years that they offered me a job.
I became a lecturer but I wasn’t very good at it – no empathy, I suppose. I was very good at practical things and I drifted into working with students in the laboratory. By the time I had my thirty-ninth birthday I was Head Demonstrator, responsible for the running of the practical laboratories for the whole department. My life was calm and untroubled. I was happy enough to talk to people when I had to but I didn’t seek their company and I certainly didn’t let anyone get close to me.
Everything changed when a demonstrator called me to deal with a hysterical female student. Her story was all too common: as a fresher she became pregnant by a fellow student and the pair set up home together to raise the baby boy. She had skipped a year for the birth and she was only now beginning her final year. The father of her child had graduated in the summer and now he had gone off somewhere to pursue his career overseas free from responsibility for both his son and his student’s loan.
Knowing nothing about women, I was appalled that the girl, Jenny, had been treated so badly. Her family had disowned her at the time of her pregnancy and she was probably going to be forced out of University before she could graduate. I had not long moved into my present home and I offered her the upstairs bedrooms and bathroom for the use of her and two year old James. This rush of blood to my normally cool head continued and within a month of meeting Jenny I had proposed marriage and had been accepted.
She was twenty-one, eighteen years my junior, when we settled down to play happy families, except that she was never perceptibly happy for long. I tried to deal with her misgivings one by one, starting with adopting James to secure his future if anything should happen to her. I settled some money on her and made a will in her favour but these things only settled her for a few weeks or months before another difficulty occupied her thoughts – and dominated our conversations!
As time went on we stopped talking to each other and lived apart within the same four walls. She bought a partnership in a little café and I took to making the meals for James and me. We became great friends and spent most of our time together until, that is, he reached puberty and became predictably horrible. I had no idea how to deal with this familiar-looking stranger and Jenny dealt with the problem by packing all her belongings and abandoning James and me.
I know nothing about parenting but it seems to me that James was given a very raw deal by his mother. Puberty is surely the time when the child takes centre stage in the family, working out his angst in a warm and stable environment. Jenny’s departure spoiled his big scene and I think it was the reason why he never truly recovered from puberty. He grew up to be Peter Pan with attitude. Apart from the effect on James the only change caused by Jenny’s departure was that I had to find someone to do the ironing – that had been her only contribution to the housekeeping.
Over the years I had exploited my ability to see forces to invent a couple of gadgets that were now bringing in enough to enable me to leave my University post to be a house-father to my adopted son. Not that my presence made any difference to James’ behaviour. I was fifty when his mother left and a successful inventor but he treated me most of the time as if he was the adult and I was the child – and a rather backward child at that!
My chief value was as the provider of cash not only to keep us in comfort but also to provide sums on demand. He became vociferously abusive in his demands and I became stubbornly unyielding. He would not work at school considering his role in life was to spend the wealth of others. At twenty-two he was an assistant in the clothing department of a store; although he kept it well-hidden at home, he was capable of being very charming. If he had been prepared to back it with hard work he could have been a success.
I had noticed an improvement in his behaviour for some weeks before he brought home a pretty young girl to meet me. Ruth was wonderful then and she becomes more wonderful with every passing year. They rented a flat and moved in together within months of meeting. James got a promotion at work and he and I got back to an understanding that we had lost almost ten years before.
He and Ruth had a baby and decided that they would marry when she was pregnant with their second child. I put up the deposit for a house for them and I paid all the legal and removal expenses. I was disappointed that they turned down the offer to live with me in the old house but I understood that young people need time on their own. James was coy about telling me how much he earned but he insisted that he would pay the mortgage on the home he shared with Ruth.
I enjoyed my time with the kids. I would babysit them and Ruth would ask me to go with her and the boys to the zoo and places like that. I liked going shopping with her where I would buy them shoes or little outfits; I had never done anything like that before, even when James was a baby. He seldom joined us on our excursions and I took selfish pleasure in having Ruth to myself. She is bright and funny and I laugh more in a single afternoon with her than I did in a month before I got to know her.
I wasn’t neglecting my work at this time. There were still some mechanical inventions that I sold but I had become obsessed with movement within a fixed time frame. The forces I see affecting solid objects begin from the moment I start looking – the starting time is always zero. It is easy for me to see the big forces but I have to strain my mental eye to spot little forces. Everyone quotes the storm in central Asia arising from the fluttering of butterfly wings in the Andes. In real life the minor forces tend to cancel each other out.
With time things are different. I quickly discovered a way to anchor time so that I could start calculations from any chosen point in time. I can nudge things back or forward in time by a few minutes for a few seconds but the further I move away from now and the longer I stay in the past or future the more the minor forces come into play. Unlike mechanical forces and movement in space, the minor temporal forces do not cancel out. Without the equations it is hard to explain but the outcome is that moving in time adds to my age.
If I go one day into the future and return immediately I will be 2.3 seconds older; an observer in my lab would see me return in the blink of an eye but my body would be older. To go ten years forward I would come back over a minute older. The result of staying in the past or future is even more aging. A ten minute stay one day in the future will age me by a total of 6.9 seconds – 2.3 for distance and 4.6 for duration. Both effects rise exponentially so long trips in either direction or stys of more than a few hours would be fatal to the traveller.
I have sent pot plants ten years into the future and brought them back healthy but I have missed some effect when going back in time so I have only managed to retrieve withered plants until now.
I was sitting quietly looking at forces in my mind to identify the ones I had so far missed when the door burst open and Ruth came in very distressed. Both she and James have keys for my house. I was very close to being disappointed to see her because I had just uncovered a possible force and I wanted peace and quiet to examine it.
Even with my lack of empathy I could tell that something was seriously wrong. My thoughts immediately leapt to the health of the boys and James but Ruth put my mind at ease by saying the problems were financial. James has not been paying the mortgage and has been suppressing the increasingly pressing demands from his mortgage lender. Ruth had been into the local branch of the lender before she came to see me.
James had not only failed to pay the mortgage, he had failed to respond to the letters sent to him. The bank had foreclosed and would not consider any other solution. Ruth had left the boys with a neighbour so I ran her home and while she collected the kids I went to talk to my son. James told me to mind my own business and went upstairs locking himself in his bedroom. I went out and talked Ruth into letting me take the boys to my house while we sorted something out.
The boys were a bit fractious, picking up, I suppose, the tension in the adults. Once we had them settled, Ruth drove back to talk to her husband. All she found was a note from James telling her she would be better off without him. When I later inquired at his place of work it became clear that my son had not only followed the example of his mum, he had taken with him the mortgage money and the shop manager’s secretary!
I was sixty-seven when James left. Ruth and the boys moved in with me until we could find a long term solution to her problems. That was the beginning of the first family life I’ve ever enjoyed. It was a delight to have the boys around the place and Ruth was simply marvellous. She insisted on paying her way be undertaking all the cooking and housekeeping, but the most important thing was that she was interesting to talk to. I can’t remember ever having a conversation with Jenny that went beyond money and her need for it.
As an old man I started to do fatherly things like school runs and bedtime stories. I suppose that is a good experience when it happens at twenty but can you imagine the added joy when you have waited sixty-seven years? For the first time since I moved into the property I failed to enter my laboratory in the basement for a full week. All thoughts of my latest experiment were forgotten in the pleasure of family life.
It wasn’t long before the serpent slithered under my bedroom door to disturb my night-time thoughts. I was behaving like a father and Ruth is a mother so I let myself wonder if she and I could get closer. I know she likes me and enjoys my company; we’re together practically every waking hour but there is still a yawning gulf of forty years between our ages. The boys began to ask if I had fallen out with their mum when I tried to solve the problem by distancing myself.
I know kids have to learn to survive in a cruel world but I was not prepared to hurt them through any action of mine. Old habits are very hard to break so I returned to my lab and tried to solve the problem of going back in time The stray thought that had flashed through my mind when Ruth burst in with the news of James’ scandalous behaviour had matured in the time since – it had formed perhaps because I ignored it and let my subconscious do the work.
My family were unperturbed by my preoccupation, since even the younger boy recognises that I become driven from time to time. I already had potted plants returning alive from an excursion into the past although they got back barely alive with leaves shrivelled and petals lost. I could see what had to be done to remove the final barrier. I was still enjoying my time with my family and I was becoming exhausted since I worked through most nights on my time machine after I had spent a fulfilled and happy day with Ruth and the boys.
I napped on a chaise lounge in the lab more often than not and it was there in the very early hours of one morning that I had my brainwave. I couldn’t move mass permanently through time but on checking and re-checking the mathematics I could see no reason why the object that returned had to be the one that was sent. If I swapped a plant I sent into the future with one grown in the future the equations wouldn’t be violated.
It was clear that I could do nothing to reduce my age but my plan was to go back twenty years and send forward me as I was then. I reckon with only a twenty year difference in our ages I could convince Ruth to become my partner in every sense. I like to think that I’ve mellowed with age but basically I would be swapping like for like. If my age is the only thing that’s stopping Ruth then she should be happy enough with the younger me.
I was regularly sending plants back through twenty years with improving results. The petals would still fall during the journey through time but the leaves remained attached and would perk up with a little attention. I was sure that I could convince my younger self to make the trip but I was deeply troubled about what would happen to me without my wonderful boys and their wonderful mother. It was a lot to give up but I felt I owed it to all of them.
Ruth had been particularly affectionate since I made up my mind to go back. It was as if she sensed that I would soon be gone and was storing up memories for me to live on for the rest of my life. I memorised her address when she was five, the age she would be when the swap was complete. I had some daft ideas about becoming a teacher in her school just to be close to her.
We had a wonderful evening together and she kissed me on the cheek when she went up to bed telling me not to work too hard. I sat on in the lounge with a paper and pen composing an explanation of what I was about to do. If there was no one in the lab in the morning I wanted her to know that I’d not deserted her but that I was only trying to make her life better. I got a bit carried away, to tell you the truth, speaking openly of my feelings for her and how I would have courted her if I had only been twenty years younger.
I waited until I was she sure she would be asleep and then I pushed the letter under her door. It was the first love letter that I’d ever written and I regretted imposing my feelings on her almost as soon as the envelope disappeared under the door. I tried to pull it back but I couldn’t get a grip. I considered opening the door to retrieve it but I was sure that would wake her up. In the end I decided that I’d leave it since I wouldn’t be about to see her reaction!
Downstairs I sent a final pot plant through to check all was well and then I got into my travel suit. I discovered very early in the experiments that synthetic fibres do not travel unchanged through time. I had bought an all-wool onesy from Finland and a local seamstress replaced the thread with pure cotton. The trouble with wool is that it goes out of shape very quickly. The onesy was baggy at the elbows and knees but especially over my backside so I looked as if I was wearing a nappy.
I was waiting for the geranium to get back when the lab door was thrust open to reveal Ruth in a dressing gown with her hair standing on end and her face white as a ghost. It took a second for me to realise that the colour was due to a liberal covering of cold cream. She had my letter scrunched up in her right hand and, as she came closer, she started to beat me on the chest with it.
“You stupid, stupid man! I love you, not some science fiction version from your past. You’ve not the least smidgen of empathy in your entire body. If you had you’d have known that I’ve been dropping hints ever since we moved in.”
I was standing where she found me in my sleep-suit completely out of my depth but I began to feel solid ground under my feet when Ruth stopped hitting me and threw her arms round my neck. I let instinct take over at that point and found her lips with mine. I tried several times to disengage while I explained that I wasn’t worthy of her but she silenced me every time with her delicious mouth. She took me to her bedroom eventually only insisting that I dump the onesy outside the door.
It turns out that age isn’t the most important thing in a relationship. I plan to spend the rest of my life convincing Ruth that she made the right choice.
The next morning I went down to tidy the lab and found the geranium I had sent into the past in the time machine had returned with its flowers blooming and its leaves glossy.
About the Author
Originally from Dalmuir, Alasdair McPherson is now retired and living in exile in Lincolnshire.
He says he has always wanted to write, but life got in the way until recently. He has already penned nine novels and many short stories. His six latest novels – The Island, Pilgrimage of Grace, Desert Ark, Swordsmiths, Loyalty and Killing Cousins – are all McStorytellers publications.
You can read Alasdair's full profile on McVoices.
He says he has always wanted to write, but life got in the way until recently. He has already penned nine novels and many short stories. His six latest novels – The Island, Pilgrimage of Grace, Desert Ark, Swordsmiths, Loyalty and Killing Cousins – are all McStorytellers publications.
You can read Alasdair's full profile on McVoices.