Fiction
It’s Not Like I Tried To Hurt Anyone
A short story about accidental time travel
I n late May, Carla decided to build a house right smack dab on the highway median — right in the middle of the road, about 60 miles south of Haskell. She picked a spot that was relatively level and wide enough for a narrow, modest home — where the grass seemed mostly healthy enough for a yard and a garden.
This wasn’t legal, of course, but she knew a highway patrol officer named Jesup who said he’d look the other way and encourage his fellow officers to do the same. He said he’d also discourage passersby from getting too nosy. She and Jesup had gone to prom together both junior and senior years, way back in the day, before there were even smartphones.
Not that she necessarily wouldn’t have decided to build a house on the median if this hadn’t had happened, but what had happened was Carla’s husband of 14 years had been in a car accident and taken a pretty bad blow to the head. And she spent months helping him recover — which was not pretty, by the way — and then as soon as he was well enough he decided to leave Carla and go live on a dharma compound in Iowa. Seriously. After all that. So now Carla’s house was too big and she needed something smaller and the median house occurred to her one day in late May, out of the blue…
