Chapter 1

The sky’s sour pink tint was a projection of Elliot’s mood. Currents rushed in and out over the pairs of feet. All the while a nagging sentiment was rapidly seizing Elliot’s paradise. Even his dead fiancée’s hand in his could not ease his agitation.  Hadn’t the happy times past? Sara seemed oblivious to the fact that she ought not to be present. She ought not to be smiling in his dream.  Her usual visits were belittling, and during the waking hours. This appearance was during a dream and absurdly pleasant. Something must be missing. Patiently, Elliot waited for the oncoming disaster. And as his patience wore thin, he instigated the demolition of his temporary bliss.

            “Where have you been?” He asked.

            “Buying flip-flops, remember?” Sara rotated her foot at the ankle, throwing dazzling, artificial rainbows into the muted morning atmosphere. Elliot took no notice.

            “No. You see I can’t help but wonder why you’re here, when as we both know you don’t come here. This is private.” His voiced edged with a definite whine at the end of his statement. He waited for Sara to berate his vulnerability with that feminine spite she possessed.

            On the horizon, and all around the couple’s feet the briny water was reeling away at an alarming rate. A single cyclone had surfaced with Elliot’s inquiries. The sky’s tapestry fell into a deepening maroon. A maroon sky, now that certainly is something, thought Elliot.

            He reached for her hand with much renewed fervor. Sara was fading, though her smile remained intact. The setting folded and crumpled around and inside Elliot like some discarded depiction of heaven, crushed on notebook paper. Sara flickered once more statically until there was no more.

            Elliot’s eyes opened as his tense spine propelled him forward. He hadn’t time to rub all the sleepy grit from his eyes before his alarm clock sounded is 7am wake up call. He shut it off and hurried to the bathroom.

            There, he picked up a dull pink razor, a Bic to be exact, and hastily sliced the stubble from his cheeks and chin. Elliot wasn’t a blond; wasn’t a redhead. He was somewhere in between, but never a strawberry. Tiny red cuts speckled his face, but that was of no matter to Elliot. The present was of very little consequence these days.

            After a quick glance at his watch, Elliot dressed, got into his car, and began his 10 minute commute. Today, like every other day, was a double shift because in Elliot’s case money was time. Or at least it soon would be.

            The dusty homes pushed passed him at flat intervals. Elliot finally looked over to see Sara sitting cross legged in the passenger seat. “You had no right.” Elliot began angrily. “Do I have absolutely no privacy?”

            Sara looked up from blowing on her wet crimson nails. Her beautiful smirk deepened. “I always ride with you to your job, if you can call it that.”

            “I meant last night, when you were in my dream.”

            “Oh right.”Sara rolled her eyes, which had returned to her nails. “You do know that, that, Sara wasn’t real. She wasn’t me.”

“You’re not exactly prime sanity yourself considering you died 8 months ago,” retorted Elliot.

“No need to remind me. My death is an extremely difficult event to forget when I’m only being seen and heard by you? Haunting only you gets very dull at times.”

“Well I figured it wasn’t really you because Sara didn’t b***h at me, not once.”

“Please stop referring to me in the third person.”

“But you just said the Sara in my dream wasn’t you,” jabbed Elliot.

Elliot and Sara were silent the remainder of the drive. Sara gave no notice to his departure, apart from her pointed leaning away when Elliot attempted to kiss his hallucination on the cheek.

Elliot’s day at his slummy job proceeded like most others. Flip, flop, sizzle; burgers on a griddle. Switch. Hello sir…no pickle or onion….have a nice day…   The hardest aspect of his job was not the monotony, but the happy people he waited upon. Mothers and children, entire families, and careless teens would all enter, and Elliot would have to keep himself from imagining the satisfactory lives they were living. The lives that Elliot could only guess at, for he had never experienced them.

Today’s lunch consisted of a chicken sandwich, fries, and a soft drink. Elliot settled into a corner booth. Frankie, who manned the mop and toilet scrubber sat across from Elliot in a grumpy huff. Elliot knew of the two things that flustered Frankie. “Well, I didn’t hear about a code yellow, so I’m guessing you heard from your mother.”

“You bet I did,” mumbled Frankie. His mouth was already full of low grade ground beef. “She wants me to come over for dinner today.”

“That doesn’t seem so bad,” said Elliot. Both his parents had past away at the not-so-ripe ages of 45 and 50.

“It gets better believe me,” Frankie grumbled through one side of his mouth as he expertly loosened his belt, and untucked his faded polo. “She’s only inviting me over so she can set me up with some checkout girl from the fabric store.”

“Oh,” Elliot sighed in false understanding. He believed he would have liked to have a mother who cooked him dinners, and set him up with women who existed.

“I don’t believe in monogamy, or any form of dating.” This was the typical opening for one of Frankie’s longwinded rants. Elliot settled into his seat preparing to surrender the remainder of his lunch break to a one sided conversation. “Love is people merely giving in to their primordial desires to reproduce. There is no loneliness; only giving in to instinct. A truly civilized person seeking to set themselves apart from animals will live a life of solitude.”

“And is that what you intend to do?” Elliot surprised himself with his interruption. Today Frankie seemed to be making some strange sense.

“Of course, and no one will sway me, not even my mother. Being a bachelor’s not so bad anyways. Is it?” Frankie drove home his flimsy argument with a playful bunch to Elliot’s shoulder. To this final comment Elliot replied in a firm whisper, “I am not a bachelor.” He swiftly gathered his trash and returned to work.

Elliot worked late into the night. He squinted into his dim attic lit only by a single bulb with a fraying pull string. Pieces lay in frenzied piles; screws, photos, plugs, wires, and in the center, the root of it all. A metal box with hundreds of holes drilled at painstakingly perfect intervals. Elliot was currently hunched over a mangled socket. There were enough wires poking from the sides and backside to tie up all the loose ends of any relationship. It was a keeper. Elliot placed it next to a ladies woven leather belt, various hinges, and a half filled photo album.

The randomness of contraptions and nostalgia would puzzle any scientist, but Elliot had a method. The simple formula had come to him, at an early age. A time Elliot remembered failing class after class. He had come to the realization that science ruled the natural and technological world. Science was of value. What was left for humans? The struggles and heartrending decisions all came down to emotions. Emotions are never to be cast aside. Put science and passion together and any problem was sure to be conquered. That is why Elliot persisted so diligently into the dark. That is why Elliot placed Sara’s perfume alongside his state of the art computer. Elliot was building a time machine with what most would consider the remnants of a rather boring yard sale. Elliot could surely demolish any barriers with the power of science and passion combined.

: : :

Stan Helmling was new to the biz. Today was his first test, a challenge to mark the start of a long and grueling probationary period. The instructions were simple. Collect money or inflict pain, and there was no guarantee he wouldn’t have to do both. Stan gripped his steering wheel a little too tightly as he took a long road from the city squalors to a drab suburb. What would Elliot Benson look like? What was he spending the mass quantities of cash on? Perhaps he would find a brand new Mercedes or Lamborghini parked at Elliot’s address. Stan’s unofficial job was to asses the situation. He was to find out about Elliot’s home security, or whether he lived with anyone. All these observations would help Stan speculate the amount of backup he’d need for later visits.

            Too soon, Stan found his car parked in front of Elliot’s home. It had loose shingles, faded siding, a slightly overgrown lawn, and certainly no snazzy car. Stan trudged tentatively up Elliot’s cracked front porch. Stan took a deep breath, raised his hand to knock, then faltered. A male voice echoed from behind the door. Stan could make out the name Sara being called loudly. Stan made his hand knock against the door.  He waited patiently, and within a couple minutes, Elliot answered the door. Stan took in the man before him. Elliot stood; he did not hunch, was not overly thin, was not a dwarf, but was somehow an extremely small man. Still Stan found himself taking a step back. It was four in the morning, and yet Elliot was dressed, but most alarming were his red, bloodshot eyes. 

            “I know why you’re here.” Elliot spoke fist to Stan’s relief. “I don’t have the money, but please come in.”

            Stan took in Elliot’s appearance a last time, and then followed him wordlessly into his kitchen. The walls were an obvious mustard color, and for a moment he thought longingly of a ballpark hotdog.

            “I can tell you work for them. You do send a message don’t you? And you haven’t even said a word.” Stan’s large frame seemed to take up most of the modest sized kitchen.

            Stroking his eyes nervously, Stan felt an onset of nausea. He had to speak before his body could. It had already begun its flow of personified suggestions. See that chair waiting to break over the man’s back. See the fridge’s door ready to slam shut on the man’s skull. You must have noticed the knife thirsting for blood…

            Elliot took Stan’s frenzied eye rubbing for fatigue, and quickly poured them both a cup of coffee. The silence was more intimidating, no, more foreboding. If only the hit man would just yell, and rage at Elliot’s lack of preparedness.  It would be order. It would be peace. They’d find his broken body face-down in the garden, his soul nowhere and everywhere with Sara.

            Stan and Elliot sat this way for some time; Stan suppressing violence, and Elliot craving an easy way out. When Stan could finally lift his head, he noticed the coffee, and swallowed the scalding liquid in one gulp. “I’d don’t want to hurt you.” S**t!  “What I mean is I won’t have to hurt you if you promise the money will be here on my next visit.”

            “It won’t. I won’t have the by then.”Elliot took his first sip of coffee and watched Stan.

            “Well then…” he faltered. “Then …” Then we’ll spill every last drop of his ketchup on those mustard walls. “Then I’ll probably have to talk to my boss.” He then cracked his knuckled, hoping Elliot sensed the danger he was in.

            On the contrary Elliot was not overly concerned. Freedom loomed on the horizon one way or another. Their business had come to a close, and Elliot watched his odd visitor leave his property. His gaze returned to the walls. Sara had painted them a year and half ago saying “this gold will really brighten the room.” All Elliot could remember thinking about at the time were the speckles of yellow pain on Sara’s golden skin.

            “He was quiet.” Sara purred. She talked in a shadow.

            “He was polite. What kind of hit man knocks on your door, and suggests that your pay up for your own good?”

            “A new one. Elliot he won’t stay a novice forever. Will you be able to pay him back?”

            “I won’t need to pay him back if all goes as planned.”

            “Elliot, what are you talking about?” Sara’s eyes looked over Elliot’s defiant face, then blazed. “Its your invention again isn’t it? That stupid time machine!”

            “It isn’t stupid.”

            “You won’t even let me see it, and I don’t even exist! You’re fooling yourself. It will never work. You won’t reverse the past. We’d have more chance of being together if you killed yourself.”

            Elliot flinched audibly. She certainly was a projection of his fears and insecurities. He went to his bedroom without trying to touch her.

            That night Elliot dreamed of tigers. He had fallen over the fence, and down a rocky ledge. The children there, at the zoo screamed, and the tigers closed in. They started licking at him and cleaning his wounds from the tumble. Still, Elliot tried to fight them off. Their bodies and mouths blotted out the sun.

            Stan was also dreaming he had a steaming hotdog in one hand, and a baseball bat in the other. He was not at the ballpark. The bat was poised above a crouching man’s head, waiting to grand-slam it to a pulp. Stan drooled and smiled in his sleep, while Elliot writhed in terror. Both men woke at 7 a.m.; the grimness of the tasks ahead of them brought each an audible sigh as they climbed out of bed. Elliot and Stan pressed on numbly.