Grilled Cheese - The Machine

Grilled Cheese
By Mark Anderson

My father was a master
grilled cheese maker.

His skills with a knife,
having served as a Marine,

enabled him to precisely slice
one slice of bread

into two thinner slices
between which a slice

of American
could easily be toasted.

The Machine
By Michael Herman

The Scientist woke up as he had each time before He was traveling through time and it always knocked him out It was one of the side effects of the travel and he wondered what sort of long term effects it would have on him Each time he waited for this to be the trip he couldn t remember how to build The Machine Or re build it depending how you considered it

He d discovered time travel He didn t know when in relation to where he was now but it was some where in the range of seventeen or eighteen years ago to him when he d made a correct guess and the answer revealed itself quickly Time as well as space was like a deck of index cards Looking at the deck of cards you might see it as one complete and whole block This was the way humans saw time and space normally But he d imagined the cards fanned out They were still a part of the deck but now you could see they were individual cards Once the parameters were in his mind he was able to take existing transportation technology and modify it for his purposes

The first trip had sent him only a short distance back in time He knew enough about causality to not encounter himself so he would wait until he went home each night to enter the lab From there he further refined the process finally working all day and all night when the other him disappeared into The Machine Soon he was ready for another jump which would send him further back The second trip sent him further back and more refinement sent him even further back than that

His progress quickly outstripped itself He was going back in time distances which made returning to his lab first inconvenient and then impossible The jumps were leading him back to when he was in university and then even further back to when he was in grade school He could no longer just drop into his own work and had to start recreating it Each time he made a jump without the benefit of notes schematics or previously collected data with each jump holding the possibility of forgetting something essential

Soon he started encountering time when they lacked some of the finer and then the basic elements of The Machine It became a new challenge for him He had to find make steal forge invent organize shape or eliminate each element entirely from scratch each time he traveled backwards It made him into a puzzle solver who knew what the final picture looked like but had to make the pieces himself

He knew he was likely reaching the end of how far he could go Even the materials which made up The Machine s parts were becoming unknown He was coming to the end of his journey and his thought as he was initiating the rudimentary Machine he d stood in front of half a second ago was What if this is the last time

He sat up and rubbed the back of his head This like the other times he had no idea how long he d been unconscious only that the process had worked and he was now further back in time than any time before He looked around and saw he was near a road cutting through a forest He planned as he had before to follow this road to the nearest town where he would explain away his stark appearance and begin again the process of re building The Machine