Rewinding Fate--Take One

 Rewinding Fate—Take One

 

Only it wasn’t Anthony

Anthony was dead.

This guy was somebody else.

 

Katya's calculations
were elegant.

Almost.

If Gina
never met Anthony,

there would be
no falling in love.

No impossible future.

No time machine.

No cat
with opinions
about quantum mechanics.

Simple.

Except...

Gina and Anthony
didn't meet
by accident.

They met
through friends.

Which meant
there wasn't
one moment to stop.

There were dozens.

A picnic.

A concert.

A borrowed canoe.

Somebody's birthday.

Somebody else's barbecue.

An invitation
nobody remembered sending.

History,
it turned out,
had excellent networking skills.

Katya kept crossing out
one rendezvous after another,

while Fate,
without even looking up,
wrote in another.

Tiki watched
the list getting longer.

"So..."

he said.

"We're not changing history."

Katya flattened her ears.

"We're editing."

"Looks more like
history's editing us."

The Time Machine
kept circling the Gunks,

patient as a vulture,

waiting
for somebody
to admit

that destiny

had mutual friends.

I'll Show You the World

 I'll Show You the World

He said, I'll show you the world,
and Gina—still soft with the faith
that good hearts recognize good hearts
mistook a wolf
for a man carrying flowers.

Anthony knew every beautiful sentence
that sickness could wear.
He stitched himself from borrowed sorrows,
made every old lover a villain,
every scar a medal,
every lie sound like survival.

She believed him.

She believed tears meant truth,
that broken men only needed love,
that promises were maps,

not traps.

So they married
before the echo of warning
could catch its own breath.

He gave her rings,
stories,
and ghosts with different names.

Lola became the monster.
Laundry became betrayal.
Cold takeout became proof.

Children became witnesses
in a courtroom built from his delusions,
where Anthony was always innocent
and someone else carried the blame.

Then came the Chevy Blazer
iron crashing through the fragile theater,
truth arriving without knocking,
headlights cutting straight through
his careful performance.

Still he called.

Still his voice wrapped itself
around her hope
like ivy around a gravestone.

Still she believed
the next apology
would be the honest one.

So they crossed an ocean together,
newly married,
chasing the paradise
he'd painted in impossible colors.

Hawaii waited,
green and breathtaking,
while beneath every postcard sunset
his darkness unpacked itself
one lie,
one wound,
one cruelty at a time.

He had promised her the world.

He never mentioned
he meant
the one he had already
set on fire.