Ripples Through Time by Lincoln Cole Page A

family came over for dinner? You were at
work, or the track, or something. And my mom was trying to be nice to Emily, so
she asked her to bring the kids over. I was nine, maybe ten years old.”
    “No,” I say, “but Mellie was fit to be tied when she got
home. She wouldn’t breathe a word about what happened whenever I asked. Last
time she ever wanted to go back to your house, though.”
    Edward laughs. “Last time my mom ever invited her,” he says.
“Want me to tell you about it?”
    “I see what you’re trying to do,” I say. “You want to remind
me of my family and make me think about them.”
    “So what if I am?”
    “It won’t change anything,” I say.  And I believe it.
    I think.
    He smiles as innocently as possible. “Then why not humor
me?”
    I can’t help but snort again. “Fine…”

 
    1972 -
Jason Greenwood
Dinner and a Disaster
     
    “I was there, just a fly on the wall when your kids and
wife came over,” Edward says. “I loved my sister, completely. I mean, of course
I did, but we rarely had visitors because of her. I was excited having Jason
and Richard over.”
    “You didn’t mind what she was?”
    “She wasn’t anything,” Edward says defensively, and I
know I’ve offended him. “She was just a sweet girl who had a tough row to hoe.
Push comes to shove, I wouldn’t trade her for anyone.”
    I’m not sure I believe him. Edward is a good kid, but he
always seemed embarrassed by his sister.  Hell, I was embarrassed by her, which
was my fault and not hers. I just didn’t know how to be around people like her,
and when I was growing up you just…weren’t.
    Different times.
    “Yeah,” I say. “I never really got used to her.”
    “Is that why you never really came around?”
    “That,” I say, “and other reasons. I was selfish, and I
didn’t really know what I was missing out on. Mellie wouldn’t tell me what
happened that night, so I never really got the details.”
    “Then let me fill you in…”
     
***
     
    Jason Greenwood sat staring at the blank piece of paper. He
hadn’t actually written anything yet, but that was of no consequence. He had
ideas. Too many ideas, actually, to settle on anything in particular. He just
had to pick a starting point, and the pen in his hand would do the rest.
    Currently that pen was tapping his chin as he concentrated,
elbow resting on the corner of his desk and tongue protruding from the right
corner of his mouth. If his sister Beth saw him right now she’d probably laugh.
She always did when he was focused on something, but Jason didn’t mind much
anymore.
    Worrying about stuff like that was for little kids. He used
to be bothered by it, when he was little, but now he was ten and becoming a
man. Men were thick skinned, his dad said, and they didn’t really mind it when
their little sisters laughed at them.
    But his dad didn’t really understand Jason. He wasn’t
normal. He wasn’t one of those boring kids that got up in the morning and went
to school just to play. He was going to be famous one day, someone that
everyone respected. Like Hemingway. Or—if he got to pick—then like Isaac
Asimov. He’d just finished reading the Foundation, and that settled it. He was
going to be a writer.
    He had good ideas. Fantastic ones, actually. But the problem
was, when the stories left his imagination and went down to the paper, they
lost something: their essence. He would think of a scene, and he could actually see it playing out like cinema, but once it was on paper it became
bland. Or worse, cliché.
    But sometimes that wasn’t bad. Cliché wasn’t always
avoidable. Sometimes cliché helped a story along. He wasn’t going to stop
writing just because his ideas weren’t original. He would just have to
write better than the stories that made the concept common. He just had
to find a good beginning, and work from there.
    Jason lowered the pen to the sheet of paper and scribbled
out a quick sentence: The planet was the fifth