Emotional Outcries through Time

Tag Area: Time Travel Method
Short Story

The Heat Wave


Two stories, millennia apart, connected by office worker Paul Feron in a 20th-century New York heatwave and Roman gladiator Ferronius in a heatwave of his own. Time travel? Or a dream? —Michael Main
A dazzling streak of lightning, a mighty clap of thunder, and Paul Feron, suddenly awakened, sprang to his feet with white face and staring eyes. What had happened? God, what had happened?
Pen-and-ink drawing of a man in a Roman togo strangles another man in gladiator
                regalia in front of a gawking crowd.
  • Fantasy
  • Debatable Time Travel
Novella

Portrait of Jennie


In 1938, painter Eben Adams struggles to find his muse and put food on the table until a young girl named Jennie appears to him from some two decades earlier, beseeching him to wait for her. Over the next few months of visitations in Eben’s time, Jennie grows into her twenties, and Eben falls in love with his muse. —Michael Main
Never before had it occurred to me to ask myself why the sun should rise each morning on a new day instead of upon the old day over again; or to wonder how much of what I did was really my own to do. It may be that here on this earth we are not grateful enough for our ignorance, and our innocence. We think that there is only one road, one direction—forward; and we accept it, and press on. We think of God, we think of the mystery of the universe, but we do not think about it very much, and we do not really believe that it is a mystery, or that we could not understand it if it were explained to us.
A portrait painting of a young brunette woman in a black dress hangs in an old
                frame in front of a snowy hill.
  • Fantasy
  • Romance
  • Definite Time Travel
Feature Film

Portrait of Jennie


Unlike the original novella, only Eben can see Jennie, bringing up the possibility that she is but a ghost. The ghost theory is supported by her mild premonitions of their evenutal fate (which also differs in some ways from the novella), but we nevertheless hold out some hope that director (and the revolving cadre of five writers) intended the film to portray Jennie’s time travel. —Michael Main
There’s something different about that child. I wondered if my pencil could catch it.
Jennifer Jones (as Jennie Appleton), wearing pearls, snuggles close to
                top-hatted Joseph Cotton (as Eben Adams).
  • Fantasy
  • Romance
  • Debatable Time Travel
Short Story

There Is a Tide


A sleepless man, struggling with a business decision, sees an earlier occupant of his apartment who is struggling with a decision of his own. —Michael Main
I saw the ghost in my own living room, alone, between three and four in the morning, and I was there, wide awake, for a perfectly sound reason: I was worrying.
Color photo of young twin girls climbing high in the rigging of a ship’s
                mast.
  • Eloi Silver Medal
  • Fantasy
  • Debatable Time Travel
Short Story

Unusual Tales #3

Don Alvarado’s Treasure


Young Frank Winston has everything a man could ever want, but for the past three months, he's been unable to move on in his ideal life because he’s haunted by dreams of a band of 18th-century Spanish soldiers who buried a treasure chest in the desert north of Mexico. —Michael Main
"Oh, Professor," half chided Helen Crane, "You don’t mean to say that you believe in these dreams. That the past can actually come back into the present."
The first page of the two-page story, "Don Alvarado
  • Fantasy
  • Audience: YA and Up
  • Debatable Time Travel
Short Story

The Utterly Perfect Murder


A moving story of an outcast boy who continued to feel the pain of how he’d been excluded throughout his adult life. You’ll need to decide for yourself whether time travel creeps in. —Michael Main
I tossed the few bits of gravel and did the thing that had never been done, ever in my life.
An abstract design of a person in a bed seen through a double-hung window inset
                in a stone wall.
  • Eloi Honorable Mention
  • Fantasy
  • Mainstream
  • Debatable Time Travel
TV Episode

The Ray Bradbury Theater (s05e06)

The Utterly Perfect Murder


I felt that Bradbury’s adaptation of his own 1971 story lost its impact by turning young Doug’s childhood tortures into clichéd scenes—and still leaving it up to the viewer to decide whether there’s a moment of time travel. —Michael Main
Old Doug: Doug, Doug. . . . Come on out and play.
A black-and-white overhead photo of a young boy playing a grand piano.
  • Fantasy
  • Mainstream
  • Debatable Time Travel
Short Story

Cloche vaine


At the end of her long successful writing career, a woman is still haunted by her sister’s death four decades earlier. —Michael Main
An orange glow flows over a naked torso and head holding a bright sword with
                Jupiter and stars in the background.
  • Science Fiction
  • Definite Time Travel
Novel

Found Things #1

The Little Shop of Found Things


Xanthe Westlake and her mother are looking for a fresh start as owners of an antique shop in the village of Marlborough when a 17th century silver chanelaine calls to Xanthe’s psychic powers and eventually takes her on a quest to save a young servant girl in 1605 (and maybe, in the process, meet a handsome young architect with oddly modern views on women). —Michael Main
Had she somehow crucially alterted her own present by changing Alice’s future? The thought that she might have started some terrible chain of events that she could not possibly have foreseen, nor known about, worried her more and more. It was only in the small hours of Wednesday night that an answer came to her that seemed to make sense. The present that she knew, the way things were in her time, could only have come about if she had traveled back to the past. Her finding the chatelaine, her answering Alice’s call for help, those things were necessary to shape the past and bring about the future as it was. She had to believe this. It did work. She was a part of how things had turned out, not an alternative version, but the one she was meant to live in. If she hadn’t gone back, hadn’t taken the decision to help Alice, well, that wouldhave resulted in a different future from the one she knew.
The door and bowed window of an antiques store, both made of small window
                panels, face a sidewalk of stone pavers.
  • Fantasy
  • Definite Time Travel
Novel

Annie and the Wolves


Historical research Ruth McClintock and local high school student Reece have a journal written by Annie Oakley, from which they conclude that Annie was a time traveler to traumatic moments in her own life—a power that Ruth seems to share. —Michael Main
Reece, it isn’t just clarvoyance or neurosis, either.
She’d tell him in person, the thing they should have come out and admitted from the start.
It’s time travel.
Photograph of Annie Oakley shooting backwards over her shoulder while looking
                in a hand mirror.
  • Fantasy
  • Definite Time Travel
Flash Fiction

How Not to Time Travel


Writing in second person, you tell what it’s like to take short time travel jumps, or perhaps just what it’s like to be you. —Michael Main
Each jump, as you call them, is accompanied by a specific sensation—a deep cringe that starts inside you and expands outward until it feels like the entire universe is cringing.
Stylized outline of a rocket launching in a green circular seal for
                Daily Science Fiction.
  • Mainstream
  • Definite Time Travel