Don’t Open That Window

“Does that plane look like it’s on a normal flight path to you?”

Doug’s wife looked up from the novel she was reading. “What plane is that then?”, she asked peering skyward and feigning and interest she definitely didn’t feel. She was just getting to the juicy bit and didn’t feel like being interrupted.

“I’m sure the pilots know more about what they’re doing than you do.” With this pronouncement, she went back to the Duke and the bartender anxious to find out what that was going to turn out like.

Sparing Denise a quick glare, he went back to anxiously watching the plane in question. It was passing from view over the house. Getting to his feet, he hurried through the house to stand on the front step waiting to catch sight of it again.

Doug couldn’t say what looked off about it, but there was something for sure.

His neighbour Terry was watering the flower beds beside his front walk. When he saw Doug staring intently at the sky, he turned to see what he was looking at. There was a plane arcing peacefully across the sky, but that couldn’t be it.

“Whatcha lookin’ at Dougie?”, he asked good naturedly. Terry was fundamentally good natured. It was his default setting and sometimes, it could rub people the wrong way. They didn’t understand him and tended to think he was somehow making fun of them. 

Looking over for a moment Doug replied, “It’s that plane up there. I can’t put my finger on it,” his eyes were already tracking back to it “but there’s something just doesn’t look right.”

Terry peered more closely at the plane trying to see anything unusual to be a supportive friend. 

Young Carol Martin was riding past on her way to her friend Diane’s place so they could study (mostly teen hotties online but officially math). Seeing the two men staring upwards, she stopped her bike and looked at the sky curiously. She didn’t know what they were looking at but assumed she would know it if she saw it. After a few minutes of seeing nothing, she pushed off and pedalled on her way to Diane’s.

Presently, the plane disappeared over the truncated horizon of the nearby rooftops.

“Looked normal to me.”, Terry said apologetically and went back to his watering.

Shaking his head and still glancing at the now empty sky, Doug stood thoughtfully on his step for another minute before returning to the backyard and taking his seat on the lounge chair next to Denise.

“Doesn’t that plane look just like the last one that flew over a little while ago?” Doug asked his wife. 

Denise looked up annoyed from her book where the Duchess and a bartender were about to get juicy. “What plane?”

He pointed at the aircraft arcing gently across the bright, cerulean sky. “That one. Doesn’t it look like the one like twenty minutes ago?”

She gave an exaggerated sigh as she tended to do when she wanted him to understand he was getting on her nerve. “There was no plane twenty minutes ago.”

He started to say something, and she held up a hand palm outward in the universal gesture for “shut up”. “Even if there had been a plane twenty minutes ago, there are only so many types of big passenger planes so of course they’re going to look similar. It’s the mechanical version of convergent evolution.” Denise didn’t always read smut and sometimes liked to remind her husband of that fact.

Unconvinced but unwilling to annoy her further, he returned to his own book but continued casting furtive glances at the sky.

The third time the plane started its lazy crawl across the sky, Doug didn’t say anything to his husband Dennis. He just got up and went through the house to stand on the front porch and watch the plane.

Dennis barely noticed him leave. In the book he was reading, the Duke was about to get juicy with a blacksmith and he wasn’t about to let Doug interrupt that.

Terry was still watering his plants although as far as Doug could tell, he was watering the same ones as he had been half an hour ago. He was on the verge of saying something when two very unexpected things happened. Carol Martin cruised past on an electric scooter heading the same direction as she had been going earlier on her bike. More disturbingly, he realized he didn’t have a husband named Dennis, but rather a wife named Denise. Rushing back through the house, he realized that many of the things he was used to seeing every day were subtly different.

He emerged into a back yard he barely recognized and looked up to see the same plane sailing smoothly across the sky. Doug fell on his ass on the patio and began to laugh.

At a university in Montreal Professor Douglas Grant glanced at his research assistant, a PhD candidate named Denise Hutchins. “It should have worked damn it! Maybe we’re never going to be able to open a portal allowing us to look sideways from one timeline into another similar but slightly different.”

Denise nodded. “Even if we could, there’s the danger of falling through. If that happened you could end up endlessly flipping from one line to another forever drifting further from the reality you know. I wonder if some of the people in asylums aren’t travellers who wandered too far.

In a nearly infinite number of realities Doug sat in care facility and laughed and laughed.

Take a moment and let me know what you think. If I don’t like it, I can always go look for a reality where you said something nice 🙂

Cheers,