Nonfiction/Historical Fiction Contest Entries

Makin' History!

There are few things more disconcerting than stepping out of your supposedly trusty time machine and seeing that your entire reality has drastically changed.

I watched in horror as buggies rolled down the street, pulled by plodding horses. This road wasn't built for cars, that much was obvious, but the people steering the horses and seated inside the buggies could be seen playing, texting, and talking on smartphones. The scene was so contradictory that I would have laughed - if I wasn't so dismayed.

I turned to Higgins. "What the hell is this?"

"What?" she asked, looking confused.

I gestured wildly to the road. "This!"

"It's a street," she replied as if I was a little slow.

"That's not what it used to look like!"

"This road's been here for decades if not centuries, Cara. I don't know what to tell you."

"Are you playing some practical joke on me? Did I come back to the right time?"

"Of course you did. Where else in history would I have been ready to receive you?" Higgins stepped in front of me, grabbing my shoulder and looking into my eyes with concern. "What exactly is wrong with the road?"

"There are buggies on it!" I exclaimed.

"What, do you want people to bike everywhere?" she asked, raising her eyebrows.

"What about cars? Why don't they use cars?"

"Cars..." Higgins searched her memory for the word. Then, her eyes lit up. "Oh, cars! Yeah, why the hell would they be driving cars? Those failed in the 1920s. They were so nasty and slow - totally impractical."

"But then something happened and they kind of...took off!" I said, feeling a migraine beginning to approach as I tried to remember basic U.S. history.

"Oh, no," Higgins said slowly, stepping away from me as if I was the carrier of some horrible disease. "Oh, no."

"What? What is it?"

"Did you talk to anyone while you were in the past? Touch anything?"

"No! I hid in the shadows and observed, just like I was instructed to. No one even saw me - I was very careful."

"Well, you must have done something," Higgins retorted. "Cara, I think this might be the result of the elephant effect."

"The elephant effect?"

"Yeah. Even the most minuscule of changes can cause huge ripples across the universe."

I stared at her for a few seconds. "Do you mean the butterfly effect?"

She snorted. "That's stupid. Why would an idea involving tiny changes be named after an animal as huge as the butterfly?"

"I need to sit down," I muttered, wobbling slightly.

"Let's get you back into the lab," Higgins decided, steering me around and leading me back into the science lab where I had both embarked upon and returned from my journey into the past. "I think we need to run some tests."

*

"Well, I think we found the source of our problem," Higgins said, standing up. She had been inspecting every inch of my clothing ever since we had reentered the lab, and found nothing - that is, until she got to my shoes.

She pulled the left one off and held it so that the sole faced me. "See that?"

"Uh, no."

Higgins used her tweezers to dig something out of the grooves in my shoe. She held it close to my face - too close, once I finally realized what it was.