A Wrinkle In Time
“I’m dead, aren’t I,” Ace mumbled to himself. Unlike any other day, Ace had woken up to complete darkness.
"If this is the afterlife it isn’t so bad."
But Ace wasn’t ready to die. He had so many things to do, places to visit. He had a recording of the ‘17 hoverboard cup he wanted to rewatch, and he never got a chance to go on vacation to visit the ruins of New York. He had unfinished business.
Ace looked into the void and felt like something was watching him in turn. He glanced to the side and felt uneasy, like someone or something was waiting for him. But that was impossible because nothing was there. It was the dark! Nothing to be afraid of, and yet he was still nervous.
He quickly turned around in the same spot, looking for any signs of human life, and stumbled.
When he took a step to the side, everything shifted.
He was in a garden for as far as he could see. It was summertime, and the air was comfortably warm, flowers the size of his body. Following the flowers through the maze of yellows, blues, and other bright hues, Ace wandered about and entered a section of the garden that was fountains upon fountains.
He looked inside one of the fountains and saw shifting images. One was people, walking through the streets. The next was a family eating dinner. He considered it was television inside a fountain, but that made no sense. There were plenty of much easier ways to get one's daily dose of cable.
He looked inside another and Ace saw his friend, Fenton, half-running and half-stumbling, face contorted in determination and exhaustion. Ace jerked away in his own fear. He wondered how someone he knew was being broadcast into this strange place lost in time.
He knew he had come across something he should not have.
One again, the heavy feeling one has when someone is staring upon them settled onto the back of his head, and he slowly turned around to be greeted by the resident of the strange garden.
A man in a suit, his dark hair long, was sitting at a table, next to the tall hedges, when he was not there before. Ace questioned his own sanity, as the man in the suit was overly friendly, waving at him from afar.
“Welcome back, you’re just in time for tea!”
The man poured tea from a fancy kettle into matching cups and sat at a table made for two, with white doilies. As he approached the table, Ace noticed the round glass top held by a white wooden base of carved animals, most birds. Flowers slowly bloomed beneath the table, popping and bursting, letting off smells of fresh fruits as they decorated the strange void lost in time and space.
He was confused.
He did not expect the afterlife to be an eternal tea party.
“Where am I,” Ace asked.
“Oh, you. This stuff again. All the questions,” said the man. He waved his hand around as if shooing away a pesky fly. “You’ve been here before!”
“I have?”
"Oh, you have. Three-thousand six-hundred and fifty-two times, to be exact. I would figure you'd be tired of this by now, but you haven't given up yet," said the mysterious man, wagging his finger at Ace, as if to chastise him.
Ace gave him a blank stare, as he felt nothing towards this man he had just met.
“Come, come, don’t be a stranger. Come sit with me," the man said.
Ace warily sat down with the suited man, but immediately he felt uneasy seeing his face up close. The man looked very familiar, eerily so. Something was right, but not quite right, like seeing a tiger without stripes.
“Oh yes, I almost forgot to reintroduce myself, since, you know, you always forget,” puffed the man. “I go by many names, but I call myself Wrinkle now.”
“Wrinkle,” repeated Ace. “That doesn’t sound like a real name.”
“How rude! It is a nickname,” Wrinkle insisted.
“My name is Acheus. I go by Ace.”
“Yes, yes. I know you very well Ace”, exclaimed Wrinkle. “We’ve had so much time to get to know each other from your many, many, many visits. But every time you leave you never remember.”
“How come I never remember,” Ace quickly asked.
“Well, that’s just a side effect. I rewind everything. You get another do-over. Friends still alive, another chance at life. You know.”
Ace suddenly remembered that his friends were dead. He shot up from his seat.
"I need to go back! Send me back," Ace yelled.
“Not this nonsense again. You’ve just arrived this time. We haven’t even discussed the important stuff.”
Wrinkle was still sitting at the table, agitated that yet again he had to explain something he had literally, thousands of times.
“I don’t care!” Ace slammed his palms against the tabletop, “My family and friends need me! Send me back!”
“I can’t send you back. I can only rewind what happened.” Wrinkle sighed. “Since everything is rewound you never remember.”
Wrinkle spoke softly as he thought of the many times Ace had returned, and wondered how he would be different the next time he returned.
Ace looked crestfallen. He sat back down, and stared at Wrinkle's fancy, gold, and white teacup, wondering how he had made so many bad life choices to end up here, with a crazy man, or ghost, or something.
He just wasn't sure what Wrinkle was and didn't want to stay to find out.
"Sorry. You should just give up. It's a fool's errand," Wrinkle said.
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Ace looked like it was the end of the world. Technically it was for him.
“No, no. Send me back. I’ll do anything. Please. I can't leave yet, not if they're dead.”
“Oh don’t worry.” Wrinkle chuckled. “You do not have to convince me.”
He paused.
“I know you will be back. You always come back.”
The pain in his voice reflected on his face.
Wrinkle made Ace feel uncomfortable, because the more he looked at him, the more he thought that he recognized him. Which would be impossible. He claimed that he never remembered that they met, yet here he was, and the more the conversation went on the more Ace started to avert his eyes from Wrinkle's face.
“You are crazy. This is crazy, this is a—”
“—hallucination and none of this is real, and I need to get back home,” Wrinkle said, finishing Ace’s sentence for him. He rolled his eyes and sipped his tea.
“Needs more sugar.”
Ace was now angry that this man was more worried about his tea than the fact they were stuck in a bottomless void, and then in a garden, and all as if it were a part of the natural order.
“Forgive me. I've forgotten my manners,” Wrinkled blushed, previous bravado vanished in a snap. “You should get tea first since you're older.”
“I'm eighteen,” Ace said, “you look older than me.”
"Technically we're both older than we look, sir."
Wrinkle wriggled his nose, and a little teacup appeared, steaming hot and ready. Ace stared at the cup, afraid of what else he could do. He had never seen an ability of this magnitude.
His roommate could control light, his neighbor could fly, and the captain of his school's tennis team could pass through objects, but this, this was something else.
He didn't know if he was meeting a god or a demon and hoped it was the first.
“Ace. I can't drink until you've had some,” Wrinkle complained, as though he hadn’t just been drinking his tea. “Please.”
So Ace nervously drank some of the tea, and then he himself believed it needed more sugar. With a warm drink in his hands, Ace started to relax, and then put some sugar in his tea using a tiny silver spoon. Still, he awkwardly held his porcelain tea cup while the stranger who claimed to have met him before held his with ease.
“Why can't you just go back in time and have me remember everything?”
Wrinkle groaned and rolled his eyes. Careful to make sure his elbows never touched the table he wiggled his fingers and a porcelain plate with an eclair appeared. He took off his gloves while staring intently at the eclair as if he were about to perform surgery and not eat it.
“I am so tired of answering your frivolous questions,” Wrinkle shrilled.
“They're not! Why can't I remember!”
Wrinkle took a tone, the sort someone took when talking to a small child who didn't understand what they had done when they were wrong without trying to sound angry or upset.
"Because you cannot take the memories from one timeline to another! The only way you could go back and keep your memories is if Infiniti took you."
Ace grimaced at the name and tried to get the bad taste of out his mouth by taking sips of tea.
“If you do go back with Infiniti, you'll meet your other self, and simply, one of you will die. The version of you, right here, would be lucky to live. Usually you just die when you try that and everything begins again.”
“Have I really been here that many times,” Ace whispered.
Wrinkle quickly finished the bite of his eclair and nodded vigorously, excited, thinking that he finally remembered.
“You've been here so often, that in some reiterations the gods had a betting pool on you,” Wrinkle grinned. “Quite fantastic! Sometimes your personality is different, sometimes you come with a friend. One time you were even a woman!”
Ace tried very hard not to think about the last part.
He slumped onto the table and mumbled that he had no choice but to go back. It was already decided.
“You can stay with me," Wrinkle offered. “We can finally get to know each other.”
Ace finally stopped glancing around at anything else that wasn't the strange man, and he realized who he was, looking into his blue eyes. The same blue eyes, a strange juxtaposition with his dark skin, and there was only one person Ace knew that looked like that. Ace started to cry, and Wrinkle mistook the tears for tears of joy, trying to take Ace's hand.
He pulled his hands away and grabbed at them as if he were burned. As if the very touch of the overly friendly stranger would somehow brand him.
“Don't look at me like that,” Wrinkle spat, his face twisted like someone had replaced the sugar in his tea with lemons. “I'm just trying to be nice.”
Ace sobbed even harder.
“Why do you look like my dad?”
“Does it matter? You won't remember any of this anyway.”
All semblance of manners and demeanor had fallen away. Wrinkle was always polite to his guests, as many of them had wandered through on accident and none knew they’d wander here anyway, albeit all had decided to leave. This one, however, was special.
And he wanted him to stay.
“I don't want to be here,” Ace whispered. “I don't want to see his face and hear your voice.”
“Don't say that! Don't you ever say that!”
Ace was even more terrified as the face of his father, with the voice of a stranger, contorted and twisted and malformed in rage. Wrinkle stood from his chair, bared his teeth and promptly pushed the table onto the ground. Food, tea, and porcelain shattered everywhere and Ace shut his eyes tight, refusing to see more.
Wrinkle's rage subsided when he saw Ace sitting in the chair and trembling, vanishing as quickly as it came.
"Don't worry. I can fix this. Open your eyes," Wrinkle said.
Ace did as he was told and everything was back to what it should be.
“I'll send you back,” Wrinkle said quietly. “Just don't come back again, please. This hurts. You never remember anything.”
“I'm sorry!” Ace shouted. “But, you, you can't expect me to like you when I’ve just met you!”
Everything around them started to fade and Ace gripped the sides of his chair in fear, not knowing what the familiar stranger would do next.
" See you soon. Tell Ibis I said hi," Wrinkle said with a sigh.
Ace clung onto the sides of the chair for dear life as he fell down below, the garden no longer real. He tried not to scream or cry as he felt like he was approaching the ground. When he looked down he saw nothing below—just the void he’d woken up in.
He blacked out.