Matthew Melt glared along the cracked sidewalk. “I remember the houses being whiter.”
“I suppose you remember the grass being greener,” replied the orange and black individual, without expression.
Matthew glared at Mohankle. The parchment with the spell on it had not been inexpensive, the ingredients for a potion not easy to find. But the chance to slip fifty years back in time and look over his home town should have been worth the trouble. First off, though, he had expected a guide just a little more impressive than this multicolored individual in a cheerleader outfit from Matthew’s old high school.
When Mohankle had finished materializing out of the cloud of steam, Matthew had demanded, “If only I can see you, why bother with that rig?”
Mohankle had met Matthew’s hauteur with his own. “How do you know it’s not what I wear all the time? Let’s get on with it.” A spirit from the beyond should have shown a little more respect, he thought, particularly on finding out that one had been summoned by the famous Matthew Melt.
Still, he felt he could put up with it, just to put the finishing touches on his memoirs. Lafayette had been a sad shock to him, though. The wonderful stores downtown were a little cheap and tawdry to his older eyes, the school a shabby matter with battered textbooks and antique seats, his parents’ house a dingy place whose massive front stairs seemed to have been replaced with short concrete steps.
What he had mainly come back to see, though, was the source of his discontent. “I haven’t seen one sign of greatness so far,” he muttered, mainly to himself.
Mohankle shrugged. “Keep watching. It has to be there.” His voice, though, showed just a mite of disbelief. Matthew glared at him again, and then at the boys across the street.
All he had wanted to add to his notes was testimony to the blindness of his neighbors. They had somehow failed to see, throughout his youth, the aura of future greatness that radiated from everything the young Matthew Melt did. He had wanted to see for himself what a great man looked like in childhood, and point out the hints that somehow his whole family and neighborhood had missed.
Young Matthew had taken some hunting. Finally, though, here the boy was in shabby, cramped (it was a lot bigger in Matthew’s recollections) Garry Park, playing “Airplanes”, a game which had always appealed to him for its strategy and timing but which from across the street seemed to involve mainly making a lot of noise.
He watched himself trip and fall into a puddle. “Doesn’t seem to be so bright,” Matthew muttered, watching him splash the mud onto Kevin and Kim.
“You weren’t, actually.” Next time, Matthew thought, he’d call up an otherworldly spirit with a sense of respect, or at least less sensitive hearing.
“It isn’t!” he snapped. “You’ve brought me to the wrong place.” He thought about this. “That’s it! This is one of those alternate universes, where things were different. It’s someone else’s past! The railroad didn’t bring the line through Lafayette in this universe. That’s why it’s so small, and the school’s so underfunded. I didn’t get the same schooling. Miss Schmidt probably didn’t teach grade school in this universe, and I grew up….” He pointed at the grubby boy in the park. “Like that!”
Young Matthew, dodging the mud thrown back at him by Kim, ran out into the street. A Corvette came around the corner much too fast.
Seeing himself lying in the roadway, blood spurting, whiny voice pleading to be told what happened, Matthew’s reaction was one of triumph.
He jumped up, hand outstretched. “That proves it! That didn’t happen! The car missed me!”
Mohankle had also risen from the bench. “Because you weren’t distracted by the fat old man ranting to himself across the street.”
“Ha!” Matthew shook a finger at the boys clustered around the boy, who had stopped whining. “But that would mean I never grew up to be…wait!” The finger he was pointing looked a bit transparent.
“This is actually your own past,” said Mohankle. “Now.”
The words lingered longer than the mouth that uttered them “That’s silly!”
“True,” said Mohankle, now alone on the sidewalk. “Very silly.” And, with a nod, he vanished.
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