My machine works. I input a time and I’m taken there, as the time is now, all abandoned set pieces where the actors have since moved on. Everything continues in the present because that’s where the people are. I came here, twenty years in the past, intending to change it—and of course the present by proxy. But I’m still bleeding out, carrying the present’s fatal wound, and now that I’m here I’m content observing the suspended state of my youth. Or maybe I just want to be. Eve