You were supposed to get one of the good kinds of time travel, not this.
Yours was supposed to involve someone super-famous, someone whose name you did not have to explain using four to five wikis and approximate years because even you didn’t quite know when they were born. Failing the famous angle, your parents or grandparents would do. Great-grandparents are too far. You personally remember your great-grandmother, a tiny spark plug of a woman, but nobody else does. Great-grandparents aren’t story. Time travel is supposed to be story.
Yours is some very confused people, including you. This seems extremely unfair.
Also, your feet are cold, the clothes itch, and the food is boring.
Nobody is laughing at your jokes.
When you start to cry and ask “Why am I here?” they send you to the priest, not for anything so exciting and culturally notable as an exorcism, just to have him pat your shoulder. He’s their guy for when people get super-upset, him or the person who seems to be everyone’s aunt, and Auntie Mary is busy with jam right now. It’s plum season and the plums are going bad fast, it’ll be a hungry winter if she doesn’t get them cooked into little pots with wax on the top. So you get the priest.
The priest is not used to weeping women who are clearly not from here. He is pretty sure someone else he trained with would be better at this, maybe Father Anselm. Maybe Father Luke. Maybe Father anybody. He tells you God has an order to the universe and a plan for all lives and you simply have to live one day at a time and find out what it is. That’s just what you haven’t done, so you wail louder. The priest did not expect this to go quite so badly. He really thought that living one day at a time and finding out God’s plan might be something you could manage.
The priest asks if you have taken your sorrows to God’s grandmother, because she is the patron of this region. He is very, very taken aback when you ask why she likes it here. You have never thought much about God having a grandmother, and it never occurred to you that she would take a particular shine to this sort of marshy backwater, but you are hoping for a wonderful story that maybe nobody in your own time knows.
The priest says that you can’t just ask God’s grandmother that sort of thing. You’re really more supposed to ask her to help you in your time of troubles. Rather than continuing to distress the priest, who is a nice enough guy and definitely not cut out for this, you go look at her statue. It’s wood, it’s bright colors, it looks more or less like a person. No insight on the marshy backwater thing.
You have never been religious before, but you’re about to float a trial balloon of a prayer, because any port in a storm at this point. But even that doesn’t happen, because the time travel people whisk you back to your own time.
Oops, they say.
Full refund, they say.
This, it turns out, is pretty unsatisfying too.
In the present day, if you cry all the time, they send you to therapy, so you skip the crying all the time part as best you can and take yourself to therapy without waiting for anyone to do the sending. Your therapist reminds you a lot of the priest except there is less talk of God’s grandmother, so you bring her up yourself since you didn’t get any satisfying answers there. The therapist, like you, had not really given her much thought and seems to think you’re trying to distract from your actual problems.
So you find a church and you ask the priest there—pastor, she corrects you—whether she thinks that God has a plan and you have to just live one day at a time and find out what it is, and if you time travel you screw it all up forever.
I don’t think screwing things all up forever sounds right, she says. I think screwing things all up forever is kind of a cop-out. I think mostly what we do is live with the thing we did before and try to figure out the next thing.
This does not sound like priest talk. Maybe this is why she corrected you on her title. Then again, your priest experience is limited to that one guy who was kind of fixated on God’s grandmother. You ask this pastor what she knows about God’s grandmother and she says that it’s all apocryphal, really, almost nothing is known.
It feels like this person is fixated on not knowing stuff and doing your best anyway, and what good is that to you, you can get that from your therapist, so you leave, you go home, you look at the stockings you had from your time travel, which are woollen and lumpy and itched more than you ever imagined any garment could itch and did not keep your feet warm enough and were so much better than not having stockings in that place, you could hardly say.
You go back to the time travel people and you tell them, I don’t want a full refund, I want to do it again. All of it, the crying, not knowing why I’m there, people saying confusing things about God’s grandmother that I will never in my life understand. I want that again.
They tell you that they can’t send you back because they don’t know how you got there in the first place, it was a mistake. And you say yes, I understand. That’s what I want again. Whatever it is. Whatever happens next, that itches and doesn’t have the wise person because she’s off making jam. I’ll take that. I want it again.
(Editors’ Note: “The Wrong Time Travel Story” is read by Erika Ensign on the Uncanny Magazine Podcast, Episode 60A.)
© 2024 Marissa Lingen
Marissa Lingen is among the top science fiction and fantasy writers in the world who were named after fruit. She has many opinions on Moomintrolls. She has been known to cross international borders in search of rare tisanes. Her personal relationships with bodies of water are intense though eccentric. She lives atop the oldest bedrock in the US with her family, where she writes, if not daily, frequently.