If One Should Pass This Way Again
by Chelsea Polk

Something's wrong. This isn't my bed.

Miranda sat up and stared, the details clear to her eyes but not making sense—there: her Amiga computer on the battered steel and pressboard desk, painted cinderblock walls papered in art from postcards and foreign money, a thigh-high stack of books next to the green painted door.

Miranda closed her eyes, opened them again, but the vision refused to waver. The baseboard heater creaked and flirted with the cold draft from the window. A blast of sound from the radio—"The tenth caller and you'll get a chance to play 'What the Heck is That' for some great prizes. Here's the new Nirvana, only on the Rock—"

The opening hook for 'Heart-Shaped Box,' tinny through only one speaker. Miranda looked at the time. 6:45.

She knew then, but she got up out of bed, stuffing her feet in lambskin slippers. She walked to the desk, knowing every scratch and chip on its surface, to the spiral bound desk journal she knew would be there, always open to the current day. One side was filled with short notes. The first line read, "Today my day will be productive. Swim one mile." The last line read, "Today my day was frantic. Swam one mile."

She looked at the solitary line on the next page: "Today my day will be peaceful. Run five miles."

She already knew the date: November 25th, 1993. Nineteen again, on the morning when she planned to take advantage of a deserted campus and do nothing more than read books and play video games, but her determination to lose a few pounds had sent her jogging the campus loop.

She looked at the clock and thought of Devon. Remembered him, though he hadn't happened yet—how he almost didn't happen; how she lost her nerve and decided to just give up the child when it was born. How she changed her mind in a moment on the porch swing at her grandmother's, looking down at her waxing body and felt him there and knew him.

6:47. In one hour, she would crawl out of a patch of bush and limp to the nearest phone—bruises on her throat, clothes torn, one chunk of her hair torn from her head, beaten so badly that the doctors would worry about internal bleeding.

Devon in the family photos, on his great-grandmother's lap. Devon, his snub nose to match hers and the same quick hands that squeezed dinosaurs out of play-doh while she modeled faces in clay; Devon, with the coarse brown hair and laughing mouth of a stranger.

They would never catch him, never even arrest a suspect, in spite of the hair pulled from her body and the photos they would take of the bruising in the cold harsh stink of the hospital.

Devon with his haphazard bouquets of blooming weeds for her, his sunshine and crayon green marshmallow treed world, drawn sheet by sheet for the Frigidaire art gallery.

She would whisper it'll be okay it'll be okay and when the cold metal touches, her scream will echo off the tile walls.

Devon, running to her room because she had a nightmare, leaping on the bed to hug her and stroke her hair and promise to protect her.

Miranda reached into the closet and found her green sweatpants. She opened the drawer in the storage cube of her closet and took out her Jane's Addiction T shirt—it had ended up in an evidence bag. The blue hooded sweatshirt came next, her socks, the bright blue cotton thong. She laid it out on the narrow bed; what she wore, exactly.

What if she...

Miranda found another T-shirt, one she liked less, one that didn't have the first amendment on it. Set it down on the bed—

But what if that...

She had an hour. Miranda looked at the clock. Less. She reached for her favourite shirt; she dressed and locked the door behind her.

The End

Story copyright Chelsea Polk, published by the Fortean Bureau
http://www.forteanbureau.com