This Is Not My Timeline - Reactor

A queer couple escapes persecution by buying a home in an almost identical dimension.

Short story | 5,070 words

Maybe in another timeline, we are still at home and things are better.

But I doubt it.

And even if we are, I don’t live there. I live here. My fingers, my brain, my hair, my face…all of it is here and there’s no escape.

The day after the third inauguration, Frankie found a dead rabbit in the backyard. The rabbit has nothing to do with anything. Our hound, Gruff-Gruff, had chased it and snapped it around and tried to eat it before we noticed him. The rabbit wasn’t like the burning flag down the street, or our neighbors cracking open beers and watching us from their driveway every night, waiting for…I don’t even know what. It wasn’t like my sister who had stopped calling, or the way we’d tried to go get ice cream the other day and someone tried to fight us, telling us to get the fuck out. How Frankie and I had stopped holding hands when we went to the movie theater. How she’d slipped from being my partner to being my roommate when chatting with her boss. And it definitely wasn’t our state changing its slogan from The Good Life to It’s Not for Everyone. Those were all very blatant omens that things were going to get worse.

The rabbit was just a rabbit.

But somewhere between wrestling it from Gruff-Gruff’s mouth and cradling it in a towel in the kitchen, I softly said, “We can’t stay here.”

“It’s the same everywhere now,” Frankie said. “Wherever we go, it’s going to be just as bad.”

“So, we move timelines,” I said.

We’d known for a while, but it felt like shock. The absolution of having to leave had rolled in like an unwatched tide. Inevitable, but so slow that it didn’t immediately drown you. It just took, inch by inch, until you had to move. We were frogs in a boiling pot, I guess. That’s how things like this go usually, so incremental that if you wait around to see if things get better and the temperature cools, you’re too late.

It’s not the first time people like us were unwanted, and it won’t be the last.

The Time-Slip Realtor arrived two days later. Frankie had called a woman who was highly recommended on our local queer subreddit. Heather Zanga. She wore the kind of power suit that had been the go-to for every girl who had ever beaten me in speech and debate. It was crisp, clean, pressed. Like she’d woken up extra early to look perfect.

She sat in our cluttered basement, on our very old couch that we’d bought when we first moved in together. Frankie and I had been told that Heather was safe. But Frankie still didn’t touch my hand. It hurt her. I could see that.

“So, there are some very interesting options in your price range,” Heather said, pulling out her pad and projecting her screen on our wall with a swish of her wrist. “I’ll say you’re probably gonna need to up that maximum limit, though, if you don’t want to end up in a timeline with, oh I don’t know…arsenic in the water or toxic ooze making supervillains or poor public schools.”

“We don’t have children,” I said.

“You may plan to have them later,” Heather said.

We’d already planned. It had already failed.

I looked to Frankie, and then I went for it. “Would…there be a timeline with good healthcare or advanced family planning?”

“Not unless you wanna start looking at things that are way out of your comfort zone pricewise,” Heather said, flipping her screen to something that was completely out of the question.

“So, what would you propose?” I said. Frankie said nothing. She looked like she was wearing the costume of a person who was calm and collected and it was burning her up from the inside.

“Well, it depends on what you’re looking at,” she said.

“Something with protection laws,” I said.

Heather took notes, and we landed on a timeline where it is winter all the time but the one week of green grass and flowers is unforgettable and “totally worth it.” The listings call it the Persephone region. It’s also cheap, because of the aforementioned winter. Rich people go to the tropics. Queers go to wherever they can.

“In Persephone, everyone has a park right across the street from their house.” Heather showed us a picture on her screen. “Parks are free there. And well kept.”

“Oh, wow,” Frankie said. She was sold. “Look at that; everyone has a free park they can walk to.”

“That house,” I said, pointing at the little house in the corner of the picture. “For our price point, it looks kind of small.”

“Hardwood floors, one level, very well insulated,” Heather swiped to a better picture of the structure. “It’s pretty typical of a house there. You said you didn’t want to move geographically too far away, because of your budget.”

It cost too much to move timelines; moving cities would be so much more on top of our growing expenses.

“We can make it work,” Frankie said.

“What about our friends and family?” I said. “If we’re moving to a similar town, just a different timeline, what if we run into them?”

“Oh that’s already been sorted,” Heather said, swiping open a spreadsheet with a bunch of numbers and highlights on it. I felt myself retract back into the couch as Frankie gleefully looked at the shiny Excel sheet. “That’s part of my job, as your realtor, to only show you timelines and universes where you don’t already exist. Your parents and immediate family aren’t there, or they are so far away and on a completely different trajectory that it doesn’t matter. But you might run into a friend, it’s true. They won’t be your friend, they won’t know you, but…there’s nothing like rebuilding community when you get on your feet! We all need community—”

“So, you have cross-referenced the places we can afford and the places we’re allowed to go and the places that we are welcome and you came up with the one that has a forever winter.”

“Yes,” Heather said. As if to say There are no other options. And she continues on about taxes.

I tried to feel better by making a folder on my computer called Operation North Pole. I put a little picture of Rudolph as the icon. I laughed a little. And then I cried.

“Frankie.” I interrupted her counting how many cardboard boxes we had and how many we could fit in the elevator when we finally jumped timelines. “I don’t want to move.”

She stared at me. She finally said, carefully, “Honey, it’s not safe here.”

“Maybe things will get better.”

Things did not get better.

Only a couple of hours later, someone cornered us in the supermarket when we dared to share a kiss, and I got in between them and Frankie without thinking. I told Frankie to keep walking, get out of there. She didn’t. But the man didn’t leave either. He kept saying shit. And I felt this rage and it outweighed fear in that moment. I screamed at him, felt every muscle I owned coil up and prepare my body to die protecting her. He thankfully walked away, because no, I could not have taken him. I was short and chubby and had rosy cheeks that liked to smile and a backpack covered in pins from my favorite shows. I’d never even gotten in a fight in elementary school. But inside, something transformed, burst with lava, and cooled.

I would tear the whole store to the fucking ground for her.

I clenched my jaw all the way home.

“I know you’d die for me,” Frankie said that night while we curled into each other in bed, “but maybe it’s harder to live for me. Can you live for me?”

The next morning, my niece came over to play. We sat outside under our mulberry tree, and I tried to memorize every branch as we ate berries off the stems. I told her we were going to move away.

And I hated the face she made. I don’t know how to describe it. Scared? First real heartbreak? But she hasn’t known a world that isn’t this one; she doesn’t know how inaugurations used to be. So, the thing that killed me the most about her reaction was how brave she tried to be.

“Good,” she said. “I’m glad you guys will be safe.”

And when it was time to drive her home and she sang songs in the back seat, I tried to memorize her voice, the way I had memorized the tree.

Today is the move.

The elevator looks like a large, unceremonious crate made of steel. There’s a couple of beat-up seats in the corner, three kennels placed safely in the other corner for our dogs. And all of the furniture we could fit inside with us. On the walls are directions, warnings, how-tos, all the things a layman customer would need to know about time-slipping.

A little black figure of a man in distress, waving his hands above his head, as he opens the large doors on the elevator too early. DO NOT OPEN WHEN LIGHT IS RED, it warns.

We could have paid someone to come with us. But we want to do it on our own. We did pay for help getting all our furniture in the elevator. But now it’s just us. Because we don’t have the money to pay someone to babysit us through time.

“Sort of like Tower of Terror,” I say through my moving-day haze. We slept on an air mattress last night. I’m exhausted. The dogs bay and howl from their corner. I stand next to them, trying to hush them like a mom trying to hush a baby. Sometimes, I get this ghostly reflection of my mom holding me or making me laugh, and I see myself now at the age she was, doing it for my dogs, and I realize how different our two adulthoods are but…how parallel everything is.

Mom and Dad stand outside of the elevator and wave to us as we prepare to close the doors on our old timeline…and them. I’m not ready to leave them. Fuck, I’m in my thirties and I still just want to crawl into Mom’s arms and have her carry me home.

“We’ll see you for Thanksgiving,” Dad says, more like he’s asking me so I can promise him things will be okay. I nod.

And then we say goodbye. We’ve had so many goodbyes. Every Christmas, Hannukah, birthday party, graduation, Sunday pizza, and movie night, we’ve stood on either side of thresholds my whole life, saying, “See you later, alligator,” and still this feels like this is the first and last time.

“After ’while, crocodile,” I mutter. And the door slams shuts. It hisses. It seals.

We sit. The timer counts. The Persephone Timeline is the destination.

Then the whole tin can shakes. It warps. I feel like I’m high, everything rippling and bubbling, and I can’t catch my breath. Frankie holds my hand, but if she’s freaking out, she’s not showing it. She calmly sits and lets the elevator do its thing. Me, though, there’s like a cinder brick on my chest and chalk in my lungs and my heart pumps and smacks against my rib cage and it feels like COVID all over again and my ears pop and—

Something snaps.

My foot is shoved one way, then another, like we are crossing a forbidden bridge and a troll reached up and grabbed me and yanked me back. Punishment. I scream. I don’t just hear the pop; I feel it. A sound shoots up my leg bones into my hip, up my spine, a cracking, a screeching.

I scream and I scream and when the elevator stops in Persephone, Frankie rushes to see my ankle and it’s a swollen red grapefruit.

My ankle is broken. I am in a boot.

In the elevator, we lost two days and I broke my ankle, and I’m only now able to walk in a boot. So, while we move around the same in this new timeline, with two legs and gravity, it feels like I’m walking on the moon.

In my boot, I move slower.

I watch the movers lug our life story into our new house in boxes I labeled back home. There is a difference between a house and a home. A house is a place where you sign the deed and you walk in and you can tell it is the basic start of a set. Walls, bathroom, bedroom, a weird creaking floorboard you’ll learn to incorporate into your routine.

A home is not something you can just put in a box and ship to a new place.

The floors here are hardwood, not carpet like back home.

I watch Frankie, who is smiling for the first time in a long time. She freely speaks to the movers about us and our dogs, she wears her wedding ring, she is wearing this beautiful green dress she said she was saving for a special occasion.

The doctor at the urgent care mentioned that it wasn’t unheard-of that the timeline elevators can cause injuries sometimes. “Some people think it’s just a lot and…you know…against the grain…to jump universes,” he had said.

No one, not Heather, not the subreddit, no one, had told us this.

At least it was me and not Frankie.

Now, in this new timeline, in this boot, I’m looking at our kitchen and I’m trying to convince myself that it’s the same size as the one we left. I’m looking at the backyard and trying to hold on to the taste of mulberries.

After everyone is gone, I struggle to go sit out in the yard. With a little help, I can make it. I sit in my old lawn chair, under the pine tree, and I look around the yard and the adjoining park.

“Frankie?” I whisper.

She’s snapping her fingers and chasing our dog away from the tree trunk. “What’s up?” she says.

I look at the green grass. “There aren’t any dandelions here,” I say.

She looks around. “Huh. Cool.”

Our yard back home would get infested with dandelions. I would pick them and blow their seeds for the dogs to chase. Just like my mom did for me. Early Saturday mornings with Mom and Dad, blowing all the dandelions on the way to the library down the street.

“Do you think maybe we missed them?” I ask her.

“Well, with such a short summer, there’s probably not…” She keeps talking, and she doesn’t look at me, so how could she know I’m crying? I’m a quiet crier.

I would travel to any universe for her. I would forsake as many dandelions, kill any rabbit, set all the worlds on fire for her. But she wants me to live.

This timeline is not our timeline. In Persephone, there was never a me or a Frankie. But all those other ones…

On Heather’s spreadsheet, there were a bunch of universes that were flagged red, which meant we may be welcome there, but first and foremost, we already existed there. I imagine that in one of them, we’re not out of the closet and we’re still living as roommates.

I’m still queer. Neither of us know Heather. We didn’t need to. And I am not a volcano. I don’t have to be.

Maybe I met someone who wasn’t Frankie, and that means that I am miserable.

Maybe I met no one and I am in Los Angeles as a starving actress.

Maybe I’m a goat in one of them; I don’t fucking know.

But I know that somewhere, there’s a part of me that isn’t in a boot and is still at home. It doesn’t matter, though, because I’m not whoever that is.

I am stuck in the whirlwind of months that follow a Big Change. Once in a while, I raise my head up and go, “Oh, that much time has passed,” or my doctor tells me this many weeks until I can move to a brace instead of the boot…but survival kicks in when everything is still packed away and no one knows you yet. A perpetual first day of school.

Here is what I do observe through the fog:

Where my favorite lake used to be, now there is woods. Where the forest got plowed down for a factory, the trees still stand. Here, there are no porches.

There are no cell phones, just landlines.

The streetlights are all painted blue.

There’s still music, but there had never been cassettes.

Just went right from records to CDs to digital music.

The internet is high-speed but not connected to other timelines.

Flowers last a lot longer if you buy them from the store, and the bread tastes better. You can drink the water from the tap. But flowers outside are hard to find, and it seems like other countries are a little farther away than they were back home.

Winter goes on forever, and our neighbors have had a thousand-year history of making the best of things. Back where we came from, if it was cold, we stayed inside and waited for a hot day. But here, when I tell my therapist I can’t ride my bike until the next Summer’s Week, she laughs and says, “Why not?”

“Because it’s snowing outside.”

“So, bundle up. Wheels still turn in snow.”

The neighbors are very close to one another, and they expect you to chat every time you walk outside. And even though it’s winter, people stay up until two AM, even the kids, long after the sun has set. People like the dark and the light and anything in between because they love the outdoors, and they dance in the snow.

We tell our neighbors stories about where we came from. They don’t understand; they don’t care. They just nod and say, “Yeah, we heard it was bad. It’s a damn shame.”

And those back home, they don’t understand when I write letters, saying I miss them and the grocery store, and the hill leading to the grocery store. I grew up on that hill. It wasn’t just a random place in a random timeline; it was the sinew of my mind, the place where everything started and happened and was supposed to end. A place is just a where and when and maybe a what. A home is a who.

I’m tired of telling our story. I know everyone is tired of hearing it. But even when I scream out, “We lost our home, we’re strangers here, my entire life has changed,” it’s not loud enough, and if it is loud, it just comes off as irritating. We were tokens in our old timeline, and now we are a crisis whose novelty has worn off. And people don’t understand why we can only talk through letters. Why our new world is so backward.

The orthopedic doctor who finally takes off my boot and does one more X-ray of my ankle asks why we moved here. I tell her. She just nods, awkwardly. No one wants to know the truth. They want me to say, “The weather,” and then we can share a good laugh. They don’t want me to say, “We were running. And my mulberry tree is gone.”

That’s one thing that’s the same in all timelines. People are afraid to be honestly afraid with each other.

I try to remember how it was back at home when I needed to make friends as an adult and I filled my life with people. I went out and worked hard and proved myself as someone who was funny, trusting, kind…I found the people who stuck around, said goodbye to the friends who didn’t fit. It had taken a lifetime.

Am I going to do that all over again? No one knows who I am. And honestly, everyone is so busy surviving the winter, they don’t care.

So, I stop telling the story. And next time someone asks why we moved, this time a new friend I met at synagogue, I just say, “The weather.”

People come to visit us at first. But then they realize that time-slipping is heavy work. Frankie’s sister visits and our niece ends up in the doctor’s with a bad wheeze and no in-network insurance. Our friend Ariel visits and she slips a disk. My uncle and aunt come for a weekend, and my uncle’s back gets fucked up. It’s hard work, traveling against the grain of reality. Of where we’re supposed to be. Where we want to go or are forced to go.

People stop writing, stop visiting, except my parents. They can only handle the trip once every couple of months. But they are getting older. And Mom never tells me what she sacrifices to the elevator.

I meet my best friend on the street, but she doesn’t know me because she’s not my best friend. And when she asks me what I do for a living, I get tired. I don’t want to start over; I don’t want to do the whole We know each other but we don’t. She doesn’t know me, and I don’t want to do this all over again. Years and years of rebuilding. Like I was playing a game and it didn’t save.

But I love her. So, I ask her if she wants to get some coffee sometime. I make an effort. She says she’s busy. Whoever she is in this world, she isn’t interested in being my friend.

Or maybe she really is busy.

I wonder if everyone I ever loved and lost is here, hiding in strangers.

Is my grandma still alive here? I could go crazy, looking them up. But it’s not them. It’s another actor in the same shoes, playing a part with the same name or the same track but not the same soul. Or maybe all we ever are is a slice of a soul, a little fragment of something bigger, and we’re all running around, stretched too thin and allowing all these different parts of ourselves to land like dandelion fluff in different homes.

I don’t understand quantum physics; I just wanted basic human rights.

No one comes for Passover. We do Pesach alone. Frankie watches me angrily eat matzah at the table while the dogs look on.

“We could go to temple,” she says.

“They sing the same songs but it’s different melodies,” I say through a mouthful. I haven’t showered for half a week. I did not clean my kitchen. I thought we all sang the same songs the same way. I stumble over the words and feel like an outsider. Home is stepping into Shabbat wherever you are and knowing the words, and here I am, uncertain when we move and when we sit and when we sing.

So, instead, we sit in the dark. And we say nothing to one another. Together, we are alone. And even if those shadows from our old universe couldn’t follow us here, maybe they can still break us.

I’m now in PT, where I have to relearn how to stand on my toes. Which means when I go to the library for the community meeting, I don’t need to even wear a brace. No one can know by looking at me that I had a broken ankle. I guess that’s some kind of fucking metaphor for time healing all. But just because they can’t see, it doesn’t mean I still walk the same as I did four months ago.

The library is just for queer books. The community room is full of people. They each stand and tell their stories.

“I miss dandelions,” someone says. “They don’t have those here.”

Something hitches in my throat. Someone else noticed.

“I’m glad that it’s not so hot here, but I also miss the smell of sunscreen.”

“I remember when my dog sat in the backyard for the last time, and I just cried because I’d wanted to stay there until he’d passed but…we had to go. The squirrels here don’t play with him.”

“At least they still have Disney movies here…some of them.”

The little things, the details that were left behind in other timelines. Even if we all still breathed oxygen, still could shop at Aldi, there weren’t dandelions to hold in your hand and blow, throwing seeds everywhere…just a small, minute, unimportant thing that had made the other place home.

“I wish we could have afforded to go somewhere with mountains or an ocean,” someone says. Because it’s flat here.

Turns out they all had cross-referenced Aaron George’s map of affordable and safe multiverses, like Heather had for us. They all had broken something or gotten sick in the move through the elevator.

“Migration is not the same as moving,” someone says. “Fleeing is not a choice.”

And I feel my entire body become very aware of itself, and it feels like it’s on fire.

After the meeting, I just sit and listen to the chatter around me. I’m too nervous to say anything, and standing for long periods of time is still a little painful. But they’re all talking about going over to someone’s house and watching an old copy of a movie from the old timeline. A Disney movie that was shelved in production here but you could buy back home.

“Should we go?” Frankie asks me, seeing that I’m listening.

And maybe in another timeline, we go to the apartment and it’s very nice. Maybe we all become very close friends and not just because we were all abandoned here. But in this timeline, all we have in common is that we are survivors of old worlds.

Where we used to be, were there just white blank cutouts like someone snatched us from a magazine page? Who were their friends and family who can’t visit? And how long would it be until everyone at home forgot us?

Is that when this place would become home?

No. A home is not made because another home is lost.

“What are you doing?” Frankie asks me. “You missed the turn.”

“I’m going to follow the roads to our old house.”

“What! Darling, you can’t do that; it might not even be there –”

“Heather’s spreadsheet didn’t flag it as dangerous; we’re going,” I say. “I need to see it.”

“It won’t be ours.”

It will be. It’s the only thing that is.

In another timeline, it would be here, at the end of the cul-de-sac. There is a house there, but the windows are different and there’s a detached garage instead of an attached garage. And from the street, I can see that our mulberry tree was cut down years ago.

It’s not there.

It’s just a stump, sitting there in a dreary winter day, all fruit gone and never any to be picked. Its future wiped out. And in my head, I see my niece shaking the branches to make it rain sweet berries. In my eyes, I see nothing but the absence.

Maybe in another world, my niece is still eating mulberries, her cheeks and lips sticky with fresh, free food that we shook loose all on our own. In another world, we’re laughing and turning the tree into a makeshift sukkah and eating picnics underneath. Our dogs are pulling off old low-hanging branches and gnawing on them, knowing they can always get more. And the dandelions are growing through the grass.

But that’s not here.

“I want to go home,” I finally say.

Frankie doesn’t touch me. She just watches me. And she says, “But we can’t. We…” she hesitates. “If we both went back, it wouldn’t be safe. But if we…” She trails off again. The words as heavy between her teeth as they are in my ears. If we left one another, followed the rules of that old world, then I could be allowed to exist where I belonged. I would just have to forsake her and go on my own. Not queer. Not hers.

“No,” I say. “Absolutely not.”

“You could go home.”

“It’s not home if you’re not there,” I say in loud, solid words. And I gently touch her hand. Behind her I see the broken spine of the mulberry bush. But here in my palm, I feel her warmth.

Her warmth is not angry. It is not a fire, like mine. It is steady. It is brave. It is kind and patient.

My flames were an explosion, easily choked and gone in a flash. Hers, they endure.

She takes out a pen from her peacoat, and she sketches something haphazardly in the dark on my palm. Under the blue streetlight’s glow, I see it’s a dandelion.

And I squeeze her hand. I try to keep feeling her next to me.

Maybe somewhere out there, in the cosmos, there’s a beautiful hiding place for all the people who are cut out of magazines and all the dandelions who need to grow but are unwanted. And we don’t have to scatter to survive. It’s a nice thought, in the middle of winter, that at least one of the timelines figured it out. But in this timeline, there’s Frankie and me. In this timeline, we must draw our own weeds and curl them around the roots of frozen winters and plant ourselves firmly in the ground. Because we have to keep living.

It will be a life that could have been another life, and no one will understand or care how much it hurt to uproot and scatter and try to find solid footing again. But it will be our life. No matter where we are.

The two of us are not alone.

“Let’s go home,” she whispers, her voice like the first bird when you wake, a promise of the morning.

I nod. And I turn the car back on, to return to the house with the floorboards and the snow and our three dogs and a dirty kitchen.

Because it’s not home yet, but we will make it one.

“This Is Not My Timeline” copyright © 2026 by J.R. Dawson
Art copyright © 2026 by Ash Kwak Lukashevsky

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This Is Not My Timeline

J.R. Dawson

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This Is Not My Timeline

J.R. Dawson

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