Little big moments

It was not only Melissa's last day but also the experience's. She had worked on the machine almost every day for the past four years. It had put her through college and for that she would be eternally grateful to the machine and the company.

In her booth she watched the guests run towards the more popular attractions, ones that promised the most sex and violence. Not that Melissa could blame them. When she got the job Melissa wanted to work on 11/22/63 or Zodiac, but when she attained the seniority to pick and choose her posting, she cared too much for Elizabeth Barbour to give her up.

It took Melissa all of five minutes to say her goodbyes, empty her locker and sign her exit paperwork. The rest of the scorching hot afternoon dragged.

The rule was that without visitors, the attraction remained off. It was one Melissa had stuck to when her paycheque depended upon it. Today she planned on running it for the few friends she had made at the park. Melissa would take the blame, it was not as if they could fire her for it.

"Are we really doing this? Could we not just go out and get a drink or something?" Marshall looked like any other seventeen-year-old boy, only one who had been stretched out an extra few inches. Despite his protests Melissa knew how much he hated the company and loved flaunting their rules.

"You aren't old enough to drink," Lisa was eating what looked to Melissa like raw dough. The petite blonde struggled to swallow the red-hot batter before adding, "Come on, as much as I love you, I've wasted enough of my life in this place."

Ignoring her friends, Melissa walked into the empty black box. The paint was flaking off the old wooden walls and the ultraviolet signs on the ground were all but gone. The carpet also held onto the smell of dry ice, despite the fact that the company stopped using it years ago.

Closing the door and turning on the lens, Melissa smiled and fell into her speech as if the place was packed with tourists.

"Good afternoon, everyone, my name is Melissa Path and we are about to return to the summer of 2032 and the murder of a woman called Elizabeth Barbour. How many of you know about her?"

"If I didn't work here, I would have had no idea who she was," Lisa mumbled, her burnt mouth still full.

"If I didn't know you, I would have had no idea who she was," Marshall said, his grin illuminating the gloom.

"We have some older people who visit, who remember back before the invention of the lens, it's not like it's impossible." Melissa shook her head and carried on, "Anyway, this murder went unsolved for centuries, all anyone knew was Elizabeth's body was found at the very edge of a scrapyard. For those of you who don't know what one of them is, when people still used combustion engines to travel, it was where they put those vehicles that no longer operated but could still be salvaged for parts."

"The place must have been massive!" Melissa smiled at Marshall's excitement. She still had it.

"It was approximately forty acres and all around it was forest and scrubland. It's all buildings now of course, but back then it was as barren as the moon. Elizabeth had been strung up between two trees, like a spider in a web, with her head removed. There were only a handful of suspects and no real evidence connecting any of them to the crime. Most of the proposed motives were tenuous as well."

"Back before we could print organs, there was a thriving black market for them," Lisa offered, her own attraction had been about a company of killers who had done just that.

"True, but you still can't transplant a head. Now obviously back then there were seven billion people on the planet, knowing the answer means we can limit the suspect pool a bit for you."

Upon the wall at the far side of the room an image of a smiling redhead appeared. She was leaning against a fence post and had her face turned towards the sun.

"This is Elizabeth Barbour. She was twenty-four at the time of her death and worked as a nurse. She was travelling through the area after a breakup with her then boyfriend. She was well liked and had a bright future ahead of her."

Melissa paused, her finger lingering over the controls. Instead of moving on, she continued. "Elizabeth's favourite book was The King in Yellow, she was a vegan long before meat was removed from the human diet and she had long held a desire to learn to play the violin. She even planned on learning it with her children when the time came--"

"There is no way you can know any of that!" Marshall interrupted. "Public records aren't that good and unless you won the lottery and didn't tell either of us, you don't own a Lens."

Melissa shook her head sadly as Lisa gave the boy a sharp clip around the back of his head. Marshall looked back and forth between the two women, rubbing his head more in confusion than pain.

The image on the wall was replaced by four, arrayed from left to right. The first was an older man, with cold eyes and a sharp chin. He was followed by a younger man with glasses and an attempt at a beard. Next was a middle-aged lady built like a fridge and covered in tattoos. The last image was a collection of wild hair and mud with crystal blue eyes shining through.

"Here we have Oliver Martin, owner of the scrapyard, among several other local properties. Andrew Carmel, Elizabeth's ex-boyfriend and the police's chief suspect. Louise Martin, Oliver's wife and the woman responsible for the day-to-day running of the yard. Finally we have Geoff Stephenson, a vagrant and known criminal who...well lived isn't the word for his life, but was known to reside in the woodland."

Melissa put her hands behind her back, pushed up on her tiptoes to look over a crowd that wasn't there. The others smiled at the shared habit.

"Any questions?"

"I assume the homeless guy's convictions were for violent offences, right? He isn't some white-collar criminal who went on the run?" Marshall asked.

"Three counts of aggravated assault and one attempted abduction," Melissa answered without thinking.

"I don't suppose there is a devil-worshipping cult running around the area that the Martins happened to be members of?"

"No. If the story was the same as your attraction, why would we have two?"

"Worth a try."

"Why did police think it was the boyfriend?" Lisa sucked the last of the sugar from her fingers.

"Because he was following her! Police found him in a motel a couple of miles away from the crime scene the next day. He admitted to seeing, but swears she ran off as soon as he approached her and he lost sight of her. For what it's worth, it was a known secret that the relationship was a violent one and that was why Elizabeth left him in the end."

"It's him then. Women die, and it's usually the husband, boyfriend or male stalker," Lisa answered emphatically.

"Hey that hurts! I mean you're not wrong but I can't help but feel a little outraged on my gender's behalf. I'm going with the hobo, she just happened to walk into this territory and he took her down like the apex predator he is."

Melissa and Lisa both glanced up at the picture of Geoff Stephenson and then back at Marshall with a puzzled look.

"What?"

"Nothing," The girls said in unison.

Melissa began, "I must warn you..." Then the others joined in, "...that the following experience contains scenes that some people may find upsetting and that those with a nervous disposition should exit now."

The room descended into darkness for a few moments, and Marshall began making a "wooing" noise until an elbow to the ribs from Lisa silenced him.

The room filled with a dull hum as the caged wormhole and various lenses moved into place. Light was then pulled from history and shaped into three-dimensional images, overwriting their present with a copy of events long past.

The three of them now stood on a dusty road on a balmy Texas afternoon. A breeze blew through the trees and the faint babbling of a nearby river could be heard.

"OK, I can see why you didn't want to give this one up, it's so beautiful out here." Lisa stopped talking when Elizabeth appeared at the far end of the road, purse clutched tightly to her chest. She was running, tears streaked her dirty face and she kept glancing over her shoulder.

"I told you it was the boyfriend," Lisa said.

Eventually Elizabeth stopped and placed her hands on her knees and began talking long ragged breaths. From where they stood it was obvious she was shaking. Wiping her eyes she stepped off the road and into the undergrowth, getting down onto all fours, and hiding herself from anyone who might be passing by.

"Can we fast forward to the bit where the boyfriend comes down the road?" Lisa asked.

"What makes you so sure she hasn't set off one of old Geoff's alarms and he is making his way through the bushes as we speak?" Marshall replied.

"Actually you're both wrong," Melissa said as a car came thundering down the opposite way. The driver was swerving left and right, struggling to keep control. Elizabeth crawled out at just the wrong moment, and the front of the vehicle struck her skull. She tumbled through the air and crashed a few feet away.

The car came to a sudden halt, its hazard lights blinking. The cloud of dust it had been trailing settled.

Marshall and Lisa ran towards the vehicle and peered in the windows at Oliver and Louise Martin arguing about what to do.

"No one ever gets it right," Melissa said, shrugging, and then reached into the air and began turning an unseen dial "They spend the next twenty minutes arguing about whether or not to get out the car and then another half an hour on whether she is dead or not."

Melissa wasn't skipping the events for time reasons but because it just made her sad. To see two people treat her life as an inconvenience to their own made her heart hurt.

"OK, so we are agreed we can't go to the police. They aren't going to believe it was an accident, I told you not to drink so much," Oliver scolded his wife.

"I have an idea, we can kill two birds with one stone," Louise said.

Marshall winced at the woman.

"We take her head off."

"What? Are you listening to yourself?" The words sputtered out of Oliver's mouth.

"Yes I am. I don't fancy going to jail for some random little girl who should have been looking where she was going. Do you?"

When her husband didn't reply, she carried on. "Thought not. Now we take the head and get rid of it. We make it look like some psychopath did it. String her up or some such. When news gets out, who's the first person everyone is going to think of?"

"Stephenson..." Oliver muttered.

"Exactly, we just need to crush the car at the yard and we are home and dry." Melissa despised the woman's self-satisfied look. She wanted to reach back through time and slap the taste out of the old bitch's mouth.

"Fuck, people were awful back in the day," Marshall said.

"I don't think it was people, just these two self-centred assholes," Lisa said, subconsciously picking up on Melissa's indignation.

"Do we need to stay for the next bit?" Lisa asked.

"You can stay Marshall, I'll take Lisa back," Melissa said without even looking at the hangdog expression on the boy's face.

Opening the exit door the two girls slipped out into the early evening air. The park was all but devoid of life. A couple of cleaning robots moved around but Melissa was pretty sure she and Lisa where the last to leave.

A couple of minutes later Marshall stumbled out and joined them. His face was pale and his eyes sunken. When someone is beheaded, people imagine it done with a sword in a single clean sweep but the Martins had used a dull axe and a hacksaw. It was a lesson in brutality that a lot of visitors tended to walk out on. Lisa was right to have given it a pass.

"A stiff drink will settle your nerves," Melissa assured the shaken Marshall.

Lisa took over care of the boy and led him out the park. Melissa thought about Elizabeth one final time. Her descendants would have died long before the lens was invented. So why did she care so much? That tiny moment of time had taken up so much of her life during the past four years. A cold feeling settled in her stomach as she wondered what would happen to Elizabeth's moments when Melissa was no longer around to remember them.

A work crew appeared, armed and ready to dismantle the attraction. An older man, wearing a hard hat and a suit stepped forward and began directing traffic.

"This thing is ancient, it's been here longer than I've been alive. No one even remembers who Elanor...Elaine...E...whatever her name was, let alone care who did her in. So you don't have to be gentle. I want this down and ready for work to begin first thing tomorrow."

She wanted to correct him, tell him that the woman's name was Elizabeth and that she loved The King in Yellow. Only to him it was like naming a snowflake or a shadow.

As Melissa wandered off to join her friends, she could hear the joy in the man's voice as he said, "This new one is all about Eva Banks and Pete Lee. That couple who died last week. If we hurry we can get it up and running before the guy is even caught. It's going to have lines back to the shuttle lot!"