Expiration Date

there, constituting a full block. There was a diner. A lingerie shop. The old original El station, with the pizza stand on the ground floor. The bodega on the ground floor was gone; instead, it was an old-fashioned delicatessen.

This was a dream, then. I was dreaming about the Frankford I knew as a kid.

But these weren’t hazy, sunbaked Polaroid childhood memories. This was Frankford after dark, and when I was a kid I was never allowed out on the streets of Frankford this late at night.

I thought about going back inside, finding some dream clothes in an imaginary closet somewhere and coming back out to explore. But even though I was shivering, I couldn’t resist the urge to go exploring right now.

I walked around in a daze. Frankford Avenue looked more cramped then I remembered, the El not quite as high above me. There were no empty storefronts. There was very little graffiti. This was like a movie set Frankford, built to approximate what it must have looked like in happier times. Was I remembering all of this with any degree of accuracy? Or was I making all of this shit up?

Somewhere around Church Street, about ten blocks away, I felt something whip around my leg—a sheet of newspaper. My eyes were drawn to the headlines first, but the headlines made no sense:

SAIGON ENDORSES NIXON’S VISIT TO CHINA

I glanced at the old-timey font on the top of the paper, expecting it to read The Philadelphia Inquirer.

But instead it was The Evening Bulletin, a newspaper that had been shuttered for close to thirty years now. In the right-hand corner, a black box told me I was holding the four-star sports edition. The cover price was twenty-five cents.

The date: February 22, 1972.

Which happened to be the day I was born.

The night sky turned a shade brighter, as if God suddenly remembered shit, yeah, morning, better flick the dimmer switch up a little. A dizziness washed over me like I’d been mainlining tequila.

There were more people out now, rushing past me, and they couldn’t see me—the shivering guy in T-shirt and gym shorts on a freezing morning in late February 1972. They were working-class Frankford people, in coveralls and slacks and dresses, making their way from their rowhomes and apartments to the El station for their daily commute. I wondered what downtown Philly looked like now, in this dream 1972. Maybe I should follow the crowd, hop on the El with them, check the city out. Look at the skyline in the time before they broke the City Hall height barrier.

But then another head rush hit me. My skin started to itch and burn. I decided to skip my trip down to dream Center City and go back to the apartment…the office…whatever. Maybe Erna was done blowing Mitchell by now. Maybe I could lay down on that stiff-looking sofa and then wake up back in bed with Meghan. I could question the mechanics later.

My skin was really burning now. I started to worry a little. I didn’t want to dream about burning to death on Frankford Avenue only to wake up with a space heater knocked over on top of me and discover, wow, I’ve actually burned to death. Cue Rod Serling.

I raced down the avenue, weaving in and around people who couldn’t see me. Only one dude, pushing a broom in front of his corner drugstore, seemed to follow me with his eyes.

By the time I reached the third floor of Grandpop Henry’s building I was having serious head rushes. Usually one head rush was enough to make you slow down, but these kept coming. I needed to lie down. Or wake up. Or something. I reached for the doorknob.

It was locked.

I tugged at it, then remembered. It had self-locked when I’d left.

Wait, what was I talking about? This was a goddamned dream, so it shouldn’t matter if it self-locked. I yanked on it even harder, kicked the door, screamed at it. Come on, dream door. Open. Up. Now. Erna? You in there? You mind removing yourself from Mitchell’s lap long enough to answer the door, maybe?

The early-morning sun found the east-facing window. Light prismed all the hell over the place. My skin felt unreasonably hot, Hiroshima-afterblast hot, ready to melt at the slightest touch.

I threw a shoulder at the door, hoping the dream construction crews who dealt with 1972 used cheap flakeboard. But the door held firm.

I slammed my shoulder into it, then again, and again, throwing an increasing amount of body weight with every blow.

Still nothing.

The sun was blazing through the window at the end of the hall in earnest now. I raised my left hand to shield my eyes and immediately felt a searing pain, like I’d grabbed the wrong end of a hot curling iron. I glanced up through watery eyes just in time to watch a beam of light burn away two of my fingers.

First the ring finger.

Then the pinky.

A scream forced its way out of my mouth, and then I jerked my hand away from the light. Pressed my back up against the door. Did a beam of sunlight really just slice through my fingers like it was a light saber?

I forced myself to look down. My ring and pinky fingers were on the floor, at my feet.

They weren’t severed. Not in the traditional sense, anyway. There was no blood, no ripped flesh or exposed bone. They were Play-Doh fingers, detached from a Play-Doh hand.

After a few seconds they begin to fade away and disappear completely.

III

The Thing with Three Fingers

I woke up on a hospital gurney with a skull-crushing headache and a raw throat. People in blue smocks