BY MELANIE MAGGARD
I’m in the backyard building a time machine out of Amazon Prime boxes, duct tape, old electronics, and a boom box playing the first single I bought in high school—George Michael’s “Faith.” I’ve toiled for sixteen days and nights, become sticky sweaty from dozens of PB&Js and quarts of mango margaritas.
Every morning I try a different happiness hack from self-help gurus taunting me to be more mindful, more present, more in the moment, as if I haven’t already tried that. I write journal entries that make me sadder, drink smoothies that make me fatter. Nothing makes me better.
But my machine will work this time. This time I’ll get it right. It won’t be like those other times, those other mistakes, those other me’s I couldn’t save.
I get into the machine for its inaugural launch and rest upon a musty seat cushion I sewed in middle school home ec class. Pushing play on the cassette tape, I take several deep breaths, then flip a few cardboard flap switches. I just need to believe, to have faith. My body quivers as the engine grumbles to life.
At the count of twenty, I’m in orbit. Through my plastic-wrap window I inspect the green and brown vistas bounded by blue seas and blurred by wooly clouds. I’m overwhelmed by the space between us, though it was always there.
A blog post on Superman argued if you want to reverse time, you must fly 660 billion miles per hour in the opposite direction of the Earth’s spin. I push several crayon-colored buttons to ignite the thrusters and prepare myself for the exhilaration.
I’ll venture past texts telling me they’re done loving me, past the times I doubted myself, past all the times I changed myself for them. I need to go back to Tuesday, June 12, 1996, the day before the day I met the first. I select the date in my Google calendar and stare at the event I’ve created as “REDO” and slip the phone in the glittery unicorn cupholder from my childhood bike. I want to go back to who I was before I had anyone to lose. I was better then, wasn’t I? Was I?
My reflection swims in the jewelry-box mirror mounted to the roof, silver nitrate blurring the edges of my reality. A tear-filled ocean grows on the floor of my carriage. I sense the integrity of my ship waning, smell the wet cardboard disintegrating at my feet. Dings and flashes warn me I can’t continue as I’m pulled away from the past.
The machine won’t respond to my commands as I float beneath the ozone. For an instant I’m suspended between one day and the next, who I was and who I am, the sun unable to warm me. Then the ship seesaws and my stomach drops as I fall through the atmosphere. Down through the wispy clouds, past the rosebud trees, onto the unkempt grass, where I water the daisies with my inability to turn back time.
Melanie Maggard is a Seattle-based flash fiction and short story writer who loves drabbles and dribbles. She has published in 50 Word Story, 101words.org, Microfiction Monday, The Drabble, and The Dribble Drabble Review. She has stories forthcoming in X-R-A-Y Magazine and Five Minute Lit, and has been nominated for Best Small Fiction, Best Microfiction, and Pushcart Prize recognition.