Shattered Reality
Déjà vu. Everything is the same as it was before.
Jordan sees her by the register, standing in line with a gallon of milk and a plastic bag of carrots. She looks so much like the woman he’s been searching for, the woman he loved for many years, his wife and the mother of his child. He wants to run to her, to embrace her, to tell her they can be a family again. But before he can move he knows it isn’t her.
She looks the same. She has the same dark brown hair, the same olive skin, the same heart-shaped face. He knows that if he approaches her, she’ll grab her ear and smile in the same self-conscious way that won him over so early on in their relationship. It’s Karen, but it isn’t his Karen.
He was foolish to toy with something as brittle as space and time. He breached the barrier between the worlds, and the universe shattered, torn into a billion partial reflections of his own reality. He was flung clear of the blast, soared headlong into a cosmos that was not his own, and now he must find his way home.
For a moment, just like every other moment since the accident, he considers that this world is good enough. He reaches for her. Puts his arm down. Reaches for her again. Finally, he hangs his head. This is not his home, not his Karen. She’ll have chosen another Jordan, and they’ll have had another baby Angelina. Not his home. Not his wife. Jordan turns away.
He opens the palm of his hand, raises it toward the ceiling, and a gateway appears, a hole in space that only he can see. He marches forward, resigned, and is consumed by gray.
Maybe the next world will be his own.
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