Re-Runs
by Evan A Davis
Evan Davis is an emerging author with an overactive imagination, which explains how he got here and why you’re reading this – which is great. Fiction being his first love, he’s written everything from bone-chilling horror to science fiction misadventures, bellyaching humor to thrilling fantasy, and every colorful dot in between.
He’s gotten lost in Europe, been a 6′ 4” street acrobat, has technically transported explosives internationally, has DJ’d a wedding or two, and now lives happily in Northern California scribbling about wonderful what-if’s.
His work can be found with Third Flatiron Publishing, the NIGHTLIGHT podcast, Flame Tree Publishing, The NoSleep Podcast, Bards and Sages, Quill & Crow Publishing, and others; plus a blog he occasionally updates (thelightofday.blog).
Amos sighed as he blew the dust off another box. It had been a long afternoon of stale dust, crumbling cardboard, and forgotten relics. His late father had been something of a pack rat, so there had been a lot to go through with still a lot to go through yet. But this week already, he’d managed to sort and clear the attic, the living room, and bedrooms. Next week would see the handling of his father’s office, by which time Amos felt he may be able to summon the mental fortitude needed to see to the matters of estate and finances. He was an only child, so there were no other shoulders he might foist the burden onto.
So today was just tackling the basement. Easy chore that, Amos figured. The space was predominantly thoughtless storage. He thumbed through the time-yellowed pages of years’ worth of 20th century tax returns before moving the box to the side of the room marked ‘Dump,’ opposite ‘Donate’. The basement hadn’t yet earned a zone labeled ‘Keep’.
As the box landed on the concrete floor with a thump, Amos finally put his finger on what had been quietly bugging him since he’d begun working in the basement earlier that day. There was a low, almost imperceptible buzzing in the room. Not like a fly or a bee, it had an invasive, tinny quality to it. Navigating by the pallid light of the lone, struggling light bulb that hung from the ceiling and the sunlight which fought in vain to dimly pierce the clouded basement windows, he searched out the source of the noise.
Eventually, he pushed aside a limply stacked tower of boxes to find where the persistent tone was coming from. It was an old television set like those in the 1950’s, one with a small screen, four stubby legs upon which it stood, antennae, and dials. Amos knelt down to inspect it more closely, and to his surprise it was plugged in. Compelled by nothing more than plain curiosity, Amos reached out and turned it on.
A powerful static signal blared and crackled from the set which had him quickly locate the dial for volume. He looked over his shoulder after that at the still basement. The space was so still and devoid of life that it felt more like looking over the long-abandoned bones of a timeless ruin, and the sudden burst of sound had been an intrusion, a trespass into that solemn silence. It made Amos vaguely uncomfortable, so he returned his focus to the TV set.
He set about turning the dials, then positioning the antennae when that didn’t change anything. After a few minutes of general futzing around with it proved fruitless, he was close to abandoning the whole effort when a picture suddenly came on the screen. Again to his surprise, it was a scene Amos was actually familiar with.
“Huh,” he breathed aloud, “we watched this in high school. History, with…who was it, Feldman?”
He adjusted the volume up slightly.
A 1961 Lincoln Continental slowly makes it way through Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas as part of a meandering, star-spangled motorcade. The man in the open back seat of the vehicle waves to the cheering crowd while next to his smiling wife, clad in her recognizable pink hat and coat. She leans over and says something in his ear as the car rounds the corner onto the main stretch of road through the city park. Bystanders wave, cheering and enthusiastic to catch a glimpse of the President and First Lady.
Amos tensed. He remembered what it had been like the first time he’d been shown the JFK assassination in school. Mr. Feldman had been kind enough to allow students to skip the lesson if they didn’t feel ready for exposure to the brutal nature of the broadcast. Some of his classmates had availed themselves of the opportunity, and once he’d seen it for himself he didn’t blame them for-
Shots rang out on screen.
One of Amos’s eyes squinted in anticipation, but that quickly turned to confusion at what he saw. Shots continued to sound, and sparks flew up from the Continental’s hood. The President and First Lady hurriedly shrank in their seats as the car sped away from the scene, exiting the road via an unoccupied portion of the sidewalk and jouncing across the rolling grassy areas of the park to make fair escape. The broadcast continued, cameras now focusing on the police and Secret Service members storming a building at the end of the street. More gunfire erupted and the view swiveled to show combative chaos breaking out along the grassy knoll before the signal faded swiftly back into unintelligible static.
Amos turned the television set off, and as he did so felt briefly overcome with vertigo. It forced a shiver up his spine. He regarded the appliance for a moment, chewing his tongue pensively over what he’d just witnessed. To his memory, that was absolutely not how the event had played out historically. Eventually he spun around, turned off the light, and exited up the steps back toward the rest of the house and, later, home.
His work on the basement could wait until after a few days’ break.
When Amos arrived home later that evening, he noticed a couple of fancy, unfamiliar vehicles in his driveway and on the street beside his mailbox. He vaguely remembered his wife mentioning having a celebratory lunch with her friends that day and concluded that celebrations had carried on further than planned. He took a moment to appreciate the sunset with tired eyes, while his tired legs carried him up the brick steps and into his home. He shuffled down the entry hall and shucked his jacket onto the back of his desk chair. He could hear bantering voices in the kitchen around the corner and prepared himself for the duty of polite conversation.
As he rounded the corner, there were two faces that turned to greet him. One belonged to his lovely wife, Barbara, the other to an elderly gentleman perhaps in his late eighties he now presumed was her guest. He wore suspenders and khaki slacks, had a crown of fine white hair atop his head, and beamed brightly when he saw Amos.
“Hi honey,” said Barbara warmly.
“How are ya son?” chirped the old man with the same welcoming energy and tone.
“Ah, hey there,” Amos replied to both. “Long day, but I’m getting by. How are you two?”
“About the same. Barb here was just fixing us up a couple of gin-and-tonic’s.”
“Should I be making three?” she laughed, looking to her husband.
“Ah,” he said, drawing the sound out as he thought about it. “Yeah, actually. That’d be nice. Yes, please.” She smiled and produced a third glass, notably without making introductions, Amos thought. So he tactically took a seat at one of the other stools by the kitchen’s bar top beside the old man and smiled genially with a sigh, inviting him to make the first move.
“Well come on,” laughed the stranger at last, “that’s all I get? Talk at me, son. Been a minute since I’ve seen either of you. Thought there’d be more excitement than a little hello.”
Amos froze for a moment. He was always afraid of this, of not easily recognizing someone he was clearly expected to know and who obviously knew him. He shot a searching glance over to Barbara, who replied with a raised eyebrow and a squint that each said What are you doing? and Don’t be rude, talk to him. He looked back to the stranger and decided to neither confront the issue nor risk it.
“Ah, no, I’m sorry,” he sighed, rubbing the back of his neck. “Been a long day- a long week, really. I’ve been, ah, going through some things at my dad’s house, and it’s just been a lot. Took a lot out of me, was all.” At that, the old man took a deep breath and a slow nod, and gazed somberly at the counter top for a long moment. Not quite sure what to make of the reaction, Amos tried pressing on. “How- uh, how have you been?” he stammered. “What’s new in your life?”
It was mild, but this time the gentleman’s reaction was to physically recoil and flicker his eyelids, bewildered. Barbara froze mid-cut into a lime. Amos bounced glances back and forth between his wife and the guest. The old man spoke first.
“Where’s your bandage son?” he asked, looking Amos over as if inspecting him. “Where’s your bandage, I don’t see it on you.”
“My what?”
“Well I just assumed you’d have bandaged up whatever head wound you clearly suffered today. Same one that’s made you act like a damned dullard and ask foolish questions.”
“Excuse me-”
“Moss,” interrupted his wife. “Can I speak with you in the other room?”
Amos felt like a scolded dog as he stood shamefully from the stool – ashamed of what, he still wasn’t clear – and shuffled around the corner to their bedroom. Behind him, he could hear the old man muttering something to Barbara as she made her way around him.
“That wasn’t right of me,” he said in a lower voice. “Please, I- tell him I didn’t mean it.”
“No, no,” she replied gently. “Just, give me a minute with him.” She entered the room, smoothly closed the door behind her, strode up to Amos, and spoke in a harsh whisper. “Are you alright?” she asked. Her tone made clear it was an admonishment, but her eyes showed her genuine concern.
Amos felt lost in the interaction. He didn’t know what boundaries he’d overstepped, what rules of etiquette he’d broken, or his wife’s apparent stake in this. So after a minute of letting his eyes graze about the carpet between them, he sighed. “Yeah,” he said unconvincingly. Then countering himself a moment later, followed with, “No. I’m sorry. No, not really. It’s been a long week, I’m tired, and today was just really weird, I think.”
“You think today was weird, or you think that’s what’s bugging you?”
“Both?” he suggested. “But mostly about today. I’ll explain in a minute, but who is that guy out there?”
Barbara’s eyebrows steepled into an incredulous arch. “Amos,” she began softly, “that’s your grandfather.”
He felt a chuckle rising in his chest and a smile begin to lift his cheek. He held his wife’s gaze within his own for a long moment, but found no humor in it. His countenance went flat, and then Amos felt his pulse thump a tad heavier in his neck. So far as he knew, both of his grandfathers had been dead for years, and that his wife was aware of that. He thought of the man beyond his bedroom door, sitting in his kitchen, at this moment probably drinking his unfinished gin-and-tonic alone.
His confusion wrestled with a strange sense of guilt, then he was struck by a thought.
“Which one?” he asked.
“Which one what?” Barbara asked back.
“My grandpa, apparently, out there. On whose side, Dad’s?”
She nodded. “Yeah, Grandpa Bucky.”
Amos felt his head start to spin. Looking past the unbearable strangeness of today, supposing the man was Amos’s grandfather, then his behavior was in effect a grandson ignoring his grandfather’s recent loss of child. Which meant Amos, in this moment, wasn’t the only one who was in one way or another horribly confused by the situation at present. That maybe explained the guilt, but confused he remained, nonetheless. He had no living grandfathers. So why did both Barbara and the old man act as if they all knew one another? Especially when, as far as Amos had always been told, Grandpa Bucky died in the Vietnam Wa-…
His eyes went wide. Barbara gently held his face in one hand.
“What the heck is the matter, honey?” she pleaded.
He felt his jaw going slack, closed his mouth, took a deep breath, and looked at his wife.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” he said.
*
A week later, Amos sat cross-legged on the concrete floor of his father’s basement. In front of him was the bewitched television set. At present, he simply sat in front of it, considering his own reflection in the curved glass.
The night he’d met his Grandpa Bucky had been strange. He’d locked himself in the restroom for near half an hour, looking up answers on his phone to some the many questions he found himself confronted with, then navigated a careful conversation with his wife for the others. As it had turned out, the supposedly unfamiliar vehicle in his driveway had been Barbara’s. Since, in that world, JFK’s assassination was unsuccessful, Bucky never died in Vietnam in 1972, and instead became a real estate broker after getting out of the army. With his help, not only did he and Barbara have their mortgage fully paid off in that life, Barbara followed his advice and got her real estate license rather than pursue her degree in art history. It meant changing her childhood dream of one day owning a gallery, but the extra money allowed for things like nicer cars.
There were a million, subtle ways the world was different from the one Amos had grown up with, but nothing so significant to him personally. Such that the next time he sought the power of the television, it was almost thoughtlessly that he did so, never considering that he’d again be leaving a world behind.
He watched a successful launch of the Challenger mission, which didn’t wind up affecting his personal life much other than an expensive telescope appearing in his attic and a reshaping of his social circle. Following the launch and safe return of the Challenger shuttle, enthusiasm for space exploration swept the nation when Amos’s father was in high school. He had evidently passed that fascination onto his son, as Amos then held a long-standing membership with a group of amateur astronomers he met with on weekends.
Next, he watched a broadcast of New York City the morning of 9/11 that was completely uneventful, focusing on Britney Spears and the price of gas. Amos took this to mean that the attack on the World Trade Center simply never took place. He’d researched possible connections as best he could, but simply could not deduce how that had led to his job as a NASCAR pit crew mechanic when he’d been an accountant previously.
From there the changes to history grew more bizarre, and their effects on Amos’s life became more and more drastic.
A fan got through security and rushed the stage during Queen’s performance at Live Aid, which led to an even greater influx of attention and donations to the event and greater national investment overall into disease prevention, but Amos’s mother volunteering for clinical trials around that time led to him being born a paraplegic. Next, the stadium of the first Super Bowl between the Packers and the Chiefs was struck by a small meteor in the third quarter, which meant Amos never had the chance to marry Barbara, as her parents had been in attendance as young twenty-something’s and were killed by the impact.
So it was with some hesitation that Amos reached for the dial this time. He worried how the world might change, worried who else it would affect and how, but that fear was overridden by a need to have a life in which Barbara existed again. He needed his wife back.
He exhaled a long breath, and the screen crackled to life.
A crowd of people forms out of the fuzzy image presented. The day is gray and overcast, and they all stand and jeer in front of a long concrete wall plastered over with layer upon layer of graffiti. A woman in a thick wool coat stands atop the wall shouting a rallying cry into a megaphone, and the crowd replies with its own energetic clamor. There’s a countdown, and many within the sea of people rush up to the Berlin Wall and produce hammers or other tools for demolition. By the time the countdown finishes, the work begins to see the wall brought down.
The view shifts and shows a transport of circus animals pass through the foreground by the outermost rung of activists. The lead truck appears to hit a pothole and an accident ensues, quickly spiraling beyond the hope of control. Cages full of tigers, elephants, lions, and more all spill from the trucks and smash against the road, leaving those panicked creatures to run amok and unfettered through the crowd. Many fall, many are trampled or attacked, and the chaos spreads through the area like a swift wildfire.
Amos felt an anxious knot coil tightly in the pit of his stomach. The screen began to flicker of its own accord through a progression of programs showing the fallout from the pandemonium at the wall. The display quickly flashed its way through broadcasts, first showing news coverage of the wall, then pundits and world leaders each vigorously laying conspiratorial blame or calling for responsive action, respectively. Images blurred of military mobilization as the Cold War rapidly escalated, and the knot in Amos’s stomach became a black hole.
He watched grainy footage of missile after missile leave its silo. It was then that he also noticed the slowly rising tremor which quaked the ground beneath his feet, and his breathing quickened as the light coming through the tarnished basement windows grew ever more a brilliant white. He yelped aloud when a voice came through the television announcing a countdown to impact, and with every number the rumbling under his feet grew.
Amos frantically spun the dials and twisted the antennae, but the countdown persisted. “No, no, come on!” he shouted as he slammed the set with his fist, but the number continued to fall. Finally, he ran around it and yanked desperately on the power cord. It went taught, but refused to come loose from the wall no matter how hard he pulled. The basement was bright now with the light, and the cacophonous rumbling of the earth drove him mad with panic. As the final seconds ticked away, he planted his feet against the wall and gave one last, hopeless strain against the cord.
And the cord came free.
Instantly, the rumbling stopped, and the growing light receded. The disquieting buzz was also gone, leaving the space in vacuous silence save for Amos’s harried breathing. He slowly stood, then walked over to the nearest window. The world outside was white, sheer and infinite, in every direction. Anxiety now constricted his windpipe, and nerves pricked the inside of his skull as he strained to understand what he was looking at. With shaking steps, he shuffled across the basement and up the stairs.
When he opened the door, he shrieked. Amos was looking out into a boundless, blank space. Neither light nor shadow, no sense of distance or motion, no telling up or down even without the feel of gravity against the top step. “Hello?” he shouted, and his voice carried so frictionless against the void it felt more like it had been taken from him. After what must have been several unbroken minutes of staring into that alabaster abyss, he collected what strands of his sanity remained and quietly stepped back down into the basement.
Amos stood in front of the mysterious television set contemplating his options, but determined ultimately that he didn’t really have any, save one choice. He might either stay here in a mystically floating fragment of his late-father’s home, forever kept company by his sundry, or risk nuclear Armageddon with the TV set.
He took a deep breath and plugged the appliance back into the wall.
The signal yawned to life and sat in a limbo of crackling static while Amos tinkered with the dials and wires. Eventually, a picture came into view of an old infomercial from the 90’s with Billy Mays selling a bundle of cleaning products. Amos watched cautiously, anticipating the salesman might sprout additional limbs or close with a slogan about dictatorial world governments.
When neither omen materialized and the broadcast came to a graciously uneventful close, he noticed the light through the windows had returned to its dim, mundane glow while his attention was taken up by the program. He scurried up the basement steps to find the kitchen was just as he remembered it ought to be. Then, to be sure, he placed a brief call to Barbara, who endured his bewildering questions admirably.
Tenuously satisfied with this, he returned to the basement, unplugged the reality-bending television, and shoved it resolutely to the ‘Dump’ side of the room.
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