Other Worlds Than These

grabs the scarf around my neck in his wiry hands and hauls me to my feet. His voice rises in pitch, the lost sound of a frightened child. “I want to be young again. I want to be famous again.” His eyes tear up.

“I want to be great again. You can wind all this back,” he chokes, “and this time you don’t put up that detour.”

“Jimmy, I can’t return to the same places and times. But I have a plan—” He opens the envelope as if it might contain a black widow, and shakes the contents into his palm: Marlboro cigarettes and a small drift of diamonds.

He scatters the gemstones to the pigeons and tosses me the cigarettes.

“I quit in prison.”

“Wait, that’s not a pa—” I stop.

Jimmy shuffles away, gloveless hands buried in frayed coat pockets, disappearing into the gray New York streets he once haunted.

Columbus, our merchant-apostle, fervently believed that as lord of Hispaniola he would bring piety and civilization to the barbarous los Indios he ruled, but all he brought was epidemic and atrocity. He died a bitter pauper, unable to return to the New World with more ships and soldiers. Until his last breath he remained convinced he could rectify his mistakes and his reputation.

In uncounted worlds Jimmy is preserved as a youthful, misunderstood lost soul of postwar cinema, his mystery secure and eternal. Just look at what I’ve reduced him to in this one.

I return the identical Device disguised as a pack of smokes into my coat pocket next to its twin.

A chime, and the park vanishes in a silent white supernova.

The little car is a nimble bullet.

I blink and grip the steering wheel with white-knuckled hands, feel my right foot pressing the accelerator pedal. The desert wind screams past and the supercharger howls in answer. I glance in the little side mirror and see Jimmy’s twenty-four-year-old face. No. My face. Our face.

Memory pours back like freezing stream water.

I return after the older, broken Jimmy shuffles away, the pigeons pecking at diamonds, and they’re waiting for me. Commando shapes in night-gear, the cough and bee-sting of subsonic missiles striking my upper back and neck. A short fall into blackness.

“Better ease off a bit,” says Rolf Wutherich, resurrected from dust to take this fateful ride again. “Shoot a piston and you won’t be racing for a week.”

I forgot to tell you how they dispose of brane slicers.

They might strand you 350 million years ago in Paleozoic Kansas when it was a vast lowland swamp, part of the supercontinent Laurussia, a tasty lunch for the twenty-foot crocodiles and meter-long scorpions. Or your consciousness is transmitted into the cranium of a pinstripe-suited stockbroker right before the first airliner knifes into the WTC North Tower on 9/11, experiencing that doomed soul’s final moments of stark terror.

The last mile unwinds like the final reel of a familiar film. The radio plays “Love’s Old Sweet Song.” A hawk flaps up from a telephone pole. The mechanical clock in the Spyder’s dashboard reads 5:39 P.M.

We round a bend and cruise down a mild hill toward the 41 junction. A car is waiting, a ’50 Ford Tudor, idling on the centerline. Jimmy’s heart—my heart—begins hammering a slow drum-roll. Sweat rolls into my eyes. Piloted by the dependable Donald Turnipseed, the Ford hesitates and then lurches across the ash-colored highway. Rolf shouts above the wind as I veer directly into its path. His hand reaches for the wheel and I bat it away. No sense in fighting fate unless you’re in a Wobbly. The blunt chrome nose of the Ford blots out the high deep-blue sky. I glimpse its driver’s white face. It’s a good death, and just penance for my avarice.

Jimmy’s face smiles in the mirror, young again. Immortal again. In that last instant before we hit, I give him a wink.

—For Alexandra

BEYOND PORCH AND PORTAL E. CATHERINE TOBLER

E. Catherine Tobler lives and writes in Colorado—strange how that works out. Among others, her fiction has appeared in Sci Fiction, Fantasy Magazine, Realms of Fantasy, Talebones, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. She is an active member of SFWA and senior editor at Shimmer Magazine.

When they found my uncle wandering incoherent in the foggy morning streets he wasn’t wearing his own clothes.

A man unknown to me brought word of my uncle’s illness, presenting me with a small folded letter on fine ivory paper. The paper shushed between our bare fingers a moment before he turned away. He traced his way through the general store with its many occupants, back into the bustle of the street.

“Sir!”

Clutching the letter at which I’d only glanced, I followed him through the double doors, grabbing his jacket sleeve before he could be overcome by a claret and gold four-in-hand. The black horses blew past us and onward down the cobblestones with the loud ring of their silver-shod feet overtaking my words.

The man glared down at me as if I had upset his day rather than he mine. There was something in his eyes, half familiar and frightening. He was not an older man; he seemed of a marrying age, but I knew he was not married. How I knew this, I could not say. He disliked my consideration of him and twisted his arm free from my hold.

“You’d best go now. He hasn’t much time.”

“Are you a friend to my uncle?”

He refused me even that much information and hurried down the street after the four-in-hand, October’s breeze lifting the tails of his coat behind him. I blinked once and he was fully gone. If anyone else upon the street noticed something odd about that, they didn’t look sideways. I expected someone to gasp and say, “But here, he walked here a moment ago, and now has vanished like a candle’s flame under a breath!” No one said a word; the people were too wrapped in their own business.

Carefully I smoothed the letter I had crumpled. The ink had smudged upon the page, written in a hand I did not know. My uncle had been found this morning; he now rested at the college hospital and, as the mysterious man had, the letter urged me to hurry to his side before he passed into the next world.

There were things in that next world that my uncle would welcome, I thought as I left off shopping and followed the fingerboards to the hospital. I had never been there in my twenty years. My mother and father died there, so my uncle told me, leaving me in his capable care ever after.

He seemed capable no longer. Doctors led me to my uncle’s side and he did not know me. He clutched at my skirts and muttered, “Reynolds, fonderous Reynolds…”

I untangled his hand and saw that he indeed wore someone else’s clothes. The trousers were butternut, the coat an earthy brown. My uncle always, even on Sundays, wore black. Even his boiled shirts would have been black, but this one was whiter than I’d ever seen, with a smudge of blood against the collar, were blood to be mostly ochre.

“Uncle?”

He startled and reached blindly out. I grabbed his clammy hand and lowered myself to his bedside, to breathe in the scent of him. There was no alcohol on his breath as I’d feared. He groaned and tried to roll away from me. This motion pulled his shirt cuff back, exposing the pink, abraded skin of his wrist.

“What happened to you?” I whispered. I couldn’t fathom it.

Edgar Poe was my only kin; the man who taught me geography and history, the man who could scare a