I Swear It's Not My Fault

 

I realized I forgot my headphones about ten steps from my house, but I couldn’t be bothered to go back. It was only a few blocks to the bus stop. It was a beautiful morning, the air tinged warm with the promise of spring, and the blue-black sky was just beginning to blush. I figured I could use a little time with the morning birdsong and my own thoughts.

Have you ever been waking down the street when suddenly a childhood rhyme about mothers with broken backs pops into your head? Of course it makes you realize, right at that moment. That you’ve just stepped on a crack, so you do the only sensible thing. You perform an elaborate dance-hop-skip-over-the-cracks, sing song rhyme, ending with a kiss blown to the universe to save your mother, only to have all hell break loose because as it turns out, the superstition was actually true, only you mis-remembered the words, or the dance sequence, or something, and instead of un-breaking your mother’s back, you accidently opened a portal into another timeline? Have you ever had that happen? No? Just me then?

Well, I still maintain it might not have been me. There are nearly 8 billion people on the world, who knows what they were all up to at that exact moment in time. And the portal opening in my town, just a block away from where I was dancing around like I had ants in my pants in the early dawn light, well that was a just a coincidence.

They say it was a magic spell, an ancient one. Of course, before that day magic was something that existed only in children’s books and angsty teen's bedrooms. But since then, many more magic spells have been discovered, or uncovered, or rediscovered, or whatever. Now people are running around curing cancer, or summoning lightening bolts from the sky to vanquish their enemy’s, or eradicating their acne. No one has figured out a love spell yet, which sucks because I really wish the guy who drives the Jetta and lives in the apartment on the corner would finally notice me, but its probably for the best. The world is in enough chaos as it is, without having to deal with the messy moral implications that would come from making whoever you like fall in love with you.

Now, you may be wondering about what happened with that portal into the other timeline. Well, nothing bad really came from it. The earth in that timeline didn’t exist, probably obliterated by an asteroid or something. Mrs. McClatchy’s cat fell into the portal, but some orange cones were erected around it to keep that from happening again, and after a few days the spell to close it was discovered, so that was good. And I’ve sworn off magic since then. I’ve seen what it does to people, to your friends, and family, and those you love. I can screw up my personal relationships well enough on my own, I don’t need magic’s help.