Sure

Gill Howether is aware he can’t turn left on a red light, but watching him now—seated here in his RAM 4x4 so black it shines my pupils’ reflections back into themselves in funhouse mirror curving infinity—I’m convinced he needs reminding.
For his part, Dad’s what we call working out a critical path. He is edging the nose of his RAM up the corner of Hughes and Depaw, front tires revolutions past the white painted line, hoping the stoplight will swap to something painted with a little more go.
He’s intended to spend a forever here.
When you rip prior to New Dawn, temporal sequencing gets fuzzy for pre-Dawn bystanders. Without the evolved ganglia receptors, rips and the people doing the ripping look like nothing to these observers who are devoid of the needed plasticities. Not “nothing” as in, like, I can’t think of a good way to describe it—“nothing,” meaning, rippers are less than invisible to pre-Dawn bystanders. To Dad, I am unimaginable.
Even if you take the ganglia gap out of the picture, Dad’s kind of a dumb guy. I’m watching him now: see that? He’s there, still inching his massive vehicle forward at the 6th most populated intersection in southern Ohio. His back tires are now where the fronts were when I first matched to this tempo. If a pedestrian tried to cross the intersection now, what with Dad advancing in the RAM, they’d have to scramble up and belay down the fucker.
Sometimes, rarely, Pre-Dawn bystanders will get an inkling as to what’s really happening during a rip. For those who solve it, 20+ years before they've adopted the needed central nervous system adaptations, the realization is a total life ruiner. Someone traveled time to save me from a fatal trucking incident. Like, hello, broader society, this citizen’s having a mental health crisis.
The good thing about all the dumb in Dad is he won’t fit into this doomed minority of bystanders. He’ll think my presence today an angel, or alien, or Globalist psycho-strike. I just need the directive to take, and we can all go back to living our temporal lives.
I step out from the sidewalk, open the cabin door, and plop down in the passenger seat, right next to Poppa. Or, at least, that’s how it looks to me, what with my good ganglia. Dad probably just experiences that as, idon’tfuckingknow, the smell of burning toast.
“Paps,” I say, resting a hand on his shoulder.
I pause, hand clamping tighter around his muscle. I came all this way, temporally speaking. Might as well spread some vibe seeds, share a little good fortune.
“Daddy,” I say, “get this: I’m the second most popular Light Companion on FormFinder. Everyone wants just a little more of me. 1.5 billion subscribers, 450,000 active tips across a pay span. Dan Conaughue, from the news? Dude can’t fall asleep without me.”
I look into Dad’s red face, his hot skin matching the amber stoplight, wishing I could spread him some of my patented calming rays. But Light Empathy isn’t even close in this sequence—the Law of Tangible Innovation reminding me I can’t just pop 3.2 million years back to Pangean East Africa and offer Australopithecus afarensis a handgun—so I settle for a full hug across his shoulders.
Holding him close, I speak into his ear: “To be honest, I don’t even really get why. All the success. I mean, why me? It’s weirdly humbling. Something about my thigh-to-calf ratio, plus what they're calling an ‘empathetic light aura.’ Doesn’t matter. Just thought you’d like to know I figured something out.”
I kiss his whiskered cheek and pull away. On his end, this experience is probably, what? A nice, warm breeze, impromptu of nothing. Sure.
I start to rip out, nearly forgetting.
“Oh shit!” I explain unheard to him, trying to recall exactly the directive. It has to be verbatim or he becomes dead and I become ceaseless. I hum to myself, a soothing chatter of teeth, the details I had practiced suddenly far and away from where they were just a moment before.
Just speak the directive, Manny. Don’t forget: you received the highest subliminal eye-lag scorings in the “Most Pleasing Skin” category last quarter. Act like it.
“Right,” I say to Gill, acting professional. “There’s a Dude, Mickey Something, or Other, a trucker, and he mistook a 50 mg THC seltzer for a skunked sweet tea.” I check the subdermal HUD blinking on my forearm. The ability to rip is an inherent human trait now—crawling to walking to running to ripping—but people kept getting lost in ugly sequences, and, after the loss of a few thousand family trees, the United Government made rip support implants mandatory. I check mine now and it warns me along a glowing timeline that the critical path is nearly spent. “Uhh, Pip-Pop, looks like the THC just took, so the trucker’s got about 30 seconds left before his eyes get so itchy he can’t open them.”
The HUD flashes an angry red, reminding me I suck shit at this. “Oh! And the directive, I have to tell you the directive.” I clear my throat. “Father, Gill Howether, exit the vehicle.”
That seems too specific—I panic a bit. “Or, uh, just reverse a touch. Whatever’s easiest.”
With the directive out, any further action adds unmitigated variables. I pad my HUD and rip right the hell out of there, not even exiting the truck first, hoping Ma remembers this story to tell me for later.
As I break tempo, the last blurred image I see is of Dad’s face reflected in the driver’s-side glass, still stuck staring left at the traffic, his purpled brow squished against the curving glass of the windshield, the coloring of his skin deepening by heartbeat, a steaming silhouette of this life’s luckiest man set below an undulating traffic light, made concrete in the hopeful continuation of my future lived memory by brilliant photo-flash afterimage.

❋ 

Bagel Smell

“I’m trying to turn the left, I smell burning bagels, and I’m thinking Oh my God, I’m having a heart-attack, but in the same breath I miss the idea of the son I’d never get to have, maybe on account of the heart attack, and I pray for his success at basketball or video games or whatever it is they care about in the future, and I get so damn hot and compressed-feeling on account of the heart attack, and I just manage to open the door and slide out and hit the pavement, what with a woman bending over me mouthing something about an elephant on my chest, she says she’s nursing a student, or a nursing student—makes more sense—and by chest compression three or four, right about then, I hear the biggest crash of my life and I know by God I have been killed dead, but it’s less to do with me and more to do with the nurse cracking one of my ribs on the fourth or fifth compression, and I see the bank on the corner’s been cut in half by some bakery company’s 16-wheeler ramming my RAM straight into the bricks, and there’s wheat bread and cake donuts and Little Debbie knock-offs covering my jeans and spoiling my nice, white polo shirt.”
“So, in a way, the heart attack was kind of like an angel’s wings, wrapping around your heart to protect you?” the policeman asked me. He was just standing there above me, eating a cheetah print cupcake he had kicked up off the curb and into his thin hands.
“That’s a hell of a funny way of putting it,” I said up to him. I just couldn’t believe he was eating, what with me here on the ground. “The whole ‘heart attack’ was more like an antifa psy-op. Or a sex alien’s attempted perversion, is probably more the case.”
The cop’s fingers burned orange in the icing. He was eating and speaking and his handgun was nodding along in his belt and I just couldn’t believe him or the nursing student or in any of it, really. In any of the foolishness.