One Day: A Narrative Fiction

Duncan pulls into his driveway leans over to grab Penelope’s hand, presumably to apologize, and she doesn’t react. All she can do is sit there and start off into oblivion. Somewhere in her subconscious she registers that the engine had stopped, she opens the door, and slowly maneuvers out, and back into her house with no intention of ever leaving again. She crawls into bed without thinking, undressing, or greeting a single person and falls into what she can only assume is a coma. A couple hours later she wakes up to a quick and shark rapping knock and her bedroom door and her dad asked her to come with him. She agrees and instead of being greeted by his fresh farmer’s omelet as she could only expect, she’s greeted by two badges, handcuffs,

She sits down and waits for his cue. Her father promptly looks at her swearing her to secrecy and tells her if ‘they’ every find out he has this, it will be the end of ‘everything’. He rises from his desk and slides his desk to the side to reveal a door in the floor, he opens the hatch and together they crawl down. He turns on the lights and Penelope cannot believe what is in front of her. She remembers the design vaguely from when she was just a kid and her parents would disappear for hours at a time and spend many sleepless nights hunched over the desk in that very study. They would tell her it was a magic machine for when very bad things happen in the world, people can go back and try again. She had not heard of this magic machine in almost a decade, since her mother died. Yet, here it is, in all its prospective glory. A crude, generation 1, time machine. Penelope is still in disbelief when her father tells her to grab the rods on one end of the machine and put the craniometer on. She slowly starts to with little protest. It is apparent her father is in a rush and she has no time to question it. He enters the data he must and rattles off quick instructions. Type in the time and date of where she would like to go. He warns her she only has one chance at this. Her body will walk out the other side so long as she maintains contact with those rods, but a copy of her, a doppelganger would be created and sent back to

Ives. She quickly sneaks in and finds the bedroom that she almost ended up in with Duncan two lifetimes ago and perches, waiting for the second Penelope to come through the door. She doesn’t have to wait long for the second Penelope and as soon as she sees her, the third Penelope makes her move. She heads downstairs and every step gets harder and harder, her legs are getting heavier. This universe cannot support 3 copies of the same person. In an attempt to save the world, she is about to tear the universe into a fourth slice and she instinctively knows there would be no coming back from that. Her walk turns into a sprint as she grabs the second Penelope from behind and buries the steak knife deep into her back. The world stops and all eyes focus on her. The second Penelope is dead and the second universe dies along with her. No terminal cancer, no tropical storms, no failing technology, and two complete genders. All that’s left is to leave. The first Penelope cannot see this one, or all of this would be for nothing as an endless cycle would commence. She turns and sprints for the front door. Nothing else matters, she is prepared for the murders to occur, and to spend the rest of her natural born life in prison. All these thoughts, plus a million more are running through her head when she turns the corner for the last stretch before the door. The third Penelope stops cold