A short story about time travel.

Glenn Williams was a man on the edge. He suddenly found his whole world crumbing around him, in the matter of a few hours his life had completely fallen apart. Glenn, however, had a plan. He would not just change his life, he would completely reassemble it after inadvertantly and thouroghly destroying it. This man, you see, had discovered the secrets of time travel. One evening while he scraped away at an ancient chunk of decaying mortar, on the old victorian home he was remodeling, he happened upon a dusty old metal box. Thinking it was some sort of time capsule, or memory box, Glenn decided it would do no harm to pop it open and have a look inside. Expecting to find some yellowed pictures or mabye love letters from some forgotten romance, he was not at all ready for what he would discover. For in this tiny metal box lay something that would make all his pain one day go away. It was a book, it had a cover, the cover read this, Past, Present or Future: The Laymans Guide to Time Travel. Suprised yet intrigued by his discovery, Glenn pocketed the book, disposed of the case and took it on the hoof to his home, telling his boss that he had come down with a very fast setting flu. Catching the 15B home wasn't the fastest bus route to his suburban ranch style but it was the first one he passed so he hopped aboard. The longer route gave him a chance to peruse the inner pages of the book. Since childhood Glenn had been a devotee of science fiction and fantasy, he grew up with an insatiable lust for all things sci-fi and devoured the trivial, the fact and the fiction like, well, like a fat guy eating something he really, really likes. It could work, he thought to himself, I could actually travel through time. Anxious to show his beloved wife the great news, he burst through his door and ran up the stairs in glee. In his bedroom he was horrified to find his wife in the arms of another man and, another man in the legs of his wife. A mighty and verbal brawl of words and tears then began, Glenn, using the word whore alot, his wife, using the word limp alot. Then there was the punch, a strike so hard that it nearly broke the womans neck, so nearly, infact, that it did actually break her neck. It only took a few minutes for her to actually die but it seemed like forever. Suddenly terrified for himself, Glenn ran his mind over what all this meant, it didn't matter if his wife was having an affair, he had killed her, he was going to go to jail for sure, most likely get the chair. Wait, wait, the children are at their grammys place, it is Friday, surely no one will know what happened here until monday, mabye, just mabye there is time, all this Glenn pondered as he gripped the newly acquired book. The next two days were spent in his garage, studying and building, the designs on the pages of the age-old tome. What he assembled, using house hold items, an arc welder and most of his long dead ninteen-eighty two Ford F-150, he had finished his task. It was magnificent, an exact replica of the machine that was laid out in the pages of the time travel text. Tapping it into the home power supply and an old Grummand generator, Glenn stepped inside the apparatus and placed his fingers around the starter key. "With a flick of this key, I, Glenn Williams, make everything right again", he communicated to noone in particular, then he turned the key. The report was nothing shy of really loud, droning and banging noises, waking many of his slumbering neighbors, then an explosion of biblical proportions and a bright light. Glenn woke up two hours later on the floor of his garage, blood flowing from several wounds on his face, arms and torso. He was surounded by firemen and paramedics. Is the wife killer going to survive? He heard, from what he could only geuss was a police official. The answer was muffled in his ears but the gist of it was, not too damn likely officer. At that , Glenn breathed his final breath and passed from the living world. In his hurry to set his life right, he had not finished reading all the text in the venerable manual, it simply stated this. "The conundrum of time travel is only this, we can never prove or disprove the working reliability of this machine, the fact being if you travel backwards through time, you could never possibly know. The world would be exactly the same as you had always remembered it. The actuality being that, even if you did manage to change the past, it is the past you would also grow up in".

Epilogue: Glenn Williams stands outside a middle school, it is the mid-ninteen seventies. It has been over thirty years since he has looked upon this school, he touched the pavement of the parking lot to see if he was dreaming. The tar was hot in the afternoon sun, it hurt his finger tips a little bit if he left them there too long. Glenn waited for the final bell to ring inside the class rooms, watching as children shuffled out the school doors and onto the bus arrival area. Fifteen minutes passed and then he saw what he was waiting for, a chubby, young lad of only thirteen, Glenn recognized him on the spot, not his face so much, it had been many so years but he could never forget those horrible hand me down cloths his mother forced him to wear day in and day out. Glenn stomped his way to the boy, 'Glenn Williams'? He asked, the boy did not respond, choosing rather to stair at elder Glenn in the fashion of most timid, chubby, young lads who are suddenly confronted with a person they are somewhat intimidated by. Holding out an envelope to the boy, he spoke again,'This is for you, read it carefully and remember it'! At that the future Glenn Williams turned and stalked away. As he reached the spot he had arrived in and awaited the machine to hasten his return, he reminised about his old school, looking whistfully at the signpost infront of the academy of youthful teachings he read the name to himself, ah, good old Benjamin Franklin South Middle School, what crazy memories. As the automatic recall kicked in on the time travel device, Glenn thought only this,'Hey, wait a second, didn't I go to Franklin Roosevelt Middle School North'? There was a sound, not unlike the sounp the word ZAP would make if it was an audible noise and a bit of smoke.