600 Miles to Leadville

 YOUR FINGERTIPS CARESS ITS AGING SPINE, traipsing over embossed gold lettering, faded now, the little flecks that remain still smooth to the touch. You lower your nose to take a whiff and your nostrils brush frayed threads trifling out from the seam, tickling, like fringes on a desert tapis, and you close your eyes when you fan the first few yellowed pages, the warm musty smell wafting stories you remember so well—living in the country, wet laundry sheets flapping out on the line in the backyard, the summer breeze filled with shrieks of children chasing Lulu, your black cocker spaniel around the yard, tufts of soap bubbles airborne as the mutt jumps ship overturning the washing bin, her fur full of soapy suds, still reeking of skunk, and she won’t be let back into the house tonight until the foul stench is gone. You three children chase and corral her back to the tub, cajoling her with promised biscuits, and father standing on the porch watching the melee, not smiling, while every...

My gift certificate for DownTime Inc. permitted me one trip to the past for a time period not to exceed 60 minutes and with a .0016 percent risk to the timeline, which meant I wouldn’t be sleeping with Queen Victoria, debating socialism with Trotsky, robbing banks with Bonnie Parker, or singing duets with Ella Fitzgerald, and so on. Only government-approved historians were allowed more than a century into the past, and no one was allowed a temporal entanglement risk greater than 0.0053 percent. Still, it is time travel. Paradoxes happen. The clerk asked me to roll up my sleeve, providing access to my bio-port. Once she verified my identity and my data (medical history, psychological profile, employment background, and personal temporal entanglement probabilities), I would be on my way, whoosh. For months, I have been anticipating this moment with a mixture of dread and excitement. Four months ago, my wife, Esme, gave me this wonderful gift, one she knew I desired but would not indulge...

The doe stood and craned her neck over her shoulder , alerted by the slightest sounds that did not belong in the forest clearing. Her nostrils flared as she searched for the scent of danger on the warm autumn breeze, refusing to abandon her fawn, its mottled back still wet from its birth. She stood motionless over her newborn baby, her ears pricked, defenceless but defiant.        Nothing.       She licked the birth fluid from her baby and ate the fawn’s placenta.        Upwind, and thirty feet up a spruce tree, the hunter, Jon, held his breath, watching, waiting, squinting down the sight of his cocked crossbow, past the vulture feathers of the flight and the stubby bolt resting in its groove.        The doe stood, alert.       Jon squeezed the trigger. Before the doe could react, the shaft pierced her ribs behind her shoulder and lodged in her lung. She collapsed on top of her fawn. A moment late...

HE WASN'T WORTH THE THOUGHT, SCREAMED CITIZENS UNITED — A WASTE OF AIR. But what do you expect from a logic-bound channel? Meanwhile, the Anti-Capital Punishment Co-op was mobilizing. It promised to deliver at least 800 for the vigil. The rest would be up to me. Independent Intel gave me thought-time to launch a public appeal for volunteers. And I got in touch with everyone I knew — long-lost relatives, friends, friends of friends, acquaintances, work colleagues. Some blocked me. Some said yes, then quietly renegged. Others — who I thought I could rely on — said no. My own sister refused. She said to me: “He’s been found guilty, Caro, by the greatest Minds in Salvation.” “Well, they’re wrong. He’s innocent.” “They’re never wrong. They’re the Minds.” But he told me even the Minds aren’t perfect. Stray thoughts, after all, bits of faulty logic happen even to the best of us. He was innocent. I'm sure he was innocent. He had to be innocent. I knew him so well — how could we have s...

THE MAN, BARE-CHESTED AND BURLY , stands before a sliver of mirror affixed to the lamppost drawing a razor down his throat, the buildup of foam lather plopping off onto the sidewalk with each stroke. He nods as I walk by; customary. Zeus in tow pulls at the leash. I maintain my pace, but the dog is insistent, hanging back. Wafts of delicate Mediterranean herbs and spices: garlic, tarragon, anise, sage, coriander, smoked paprika, and sprigs of thyme, flow in and out on the man’s breath. I detect a hint of Baba Ghanoush, with sumac – 5 stars. He is clothed in brown oversized trousers, suggesting he has lost some weight, and three-quarter dove-grey dress socks in well-travelled Birkenstocks.  Deep purple and black chevron tattoos cover his arms. A crisp clean white shirt hangs drying on the coat rack. He insists he is not homeless. Although the sidewalk and this intersection cannot be considered residential. His accent is thick. Eastern European maybe. Mixed with flecks of French, Fl...

WHILE I AM REMINISING,  I’ve got one more funny story about this strange time in my life.  One night that summer, my little nutcase put on a dress of all things and came down to the grocery with me.  The dress was a musty, brown, plaid, to-the-knees number she’d gotten from a second-hand store some months earlier, and I could see as we were cutting actors the street outside our building that she was considering herself a real fashion plate or something, a grungy beauty queen.  Now, the mere presence of her blonde mop outside the quiet horrors of our dusty little pad was already an event, as it had been some time since she’d seen a face besides my angry mug and maybe Oprah’s, and what inspired her return to the world I didn’t know and didn’t care, I just wanted to get our stuff and get back home.  All we needed was some bare essentials—milk and bread and cereal and applesauce and fruit cocktail, which was the sort of things we pretty much lived on that summer, wh...