The Time Traveling Lawn Mower and the Dangers of eBay

February 4, 2026

Dear Mom and Dad,

Don’t worry, I’m not writing to tell you I flunked philosophy. We’re way past that. I’m dropping out. I’m not just dropping out of school; I’m dropping out of life. This world has gotten too much for me. Every time I read the news my anxiety flares up, and I can’t handle it anymore. I’m going to a better place, don’t worry about me, I’ll be fine. It’s all of you I’m leaving behind I feel sorry for. This isn’t your fault; you both have been the best parents. The fault lies in the times we live in, so I’m going to a different one.

Love, Jackie

February 8, 2026

In retrospect, I realize that the wording of my letter to my parents was poorly crafted. I was trying to be melodramatic and “pained artist” but missed the very understandable alternative I accidentally alluded to. I wasn’t planning to die, just the opposite in fact. It was my great fear of death that started the whole caper. I’ll start at the beginning with Teddy and the eBay add.

January 12, 2026

The first I heard of the time machine was from my friend Teddy, former housemate and history nerd. We had to part ways domestically due to differences in hygiene standards, but the guy is cool, and we’ve stayed friends. Teddy has two hobbies: readying through the entire history section of the university library and scouring eBay at unearthly hours of the morning. For what exactly, few have ever known, but eBay is where Teddy found the time machine.

It took us a while to decide that the time machine listed was legitimate, us being Teddy, myself and our friend Pepper. Pepper is a peripatetic sociology major with an unnerving sense of adventure and even more unnerving mood swings. But she has a car, so we’ve stuck together. Most of our meet ups after Teddy saw the time machine were spent discussing said time machine. Was it real, was it a good price as far as time machines go, was the guy selling it a serial killer, and why did it look like a lawn mower. Over time it’s presence in our conversation waned, but Teddy’s enthusiasm for it never did. The thought of going back to a better time in history was tempting for all of us.

January 25, 2026

Pepper, Teddy and I had long run out of money for therapy, so we did DYI counseling on each other, which never made anything better. If you want to save yourself from drowning, you actually need someone who knows how to swim.

“I mean every morning, you wake up to some new world-ending event on the news.” drawled Teddy from the back seat, staring at the waves beyond the beach.

“Then don’t read it.” mumbled Pepper, her mouth half full of Chinese take-out, which she had already spilled prodigiously all over the steering wheel. I lolled my head into my hand and watched the setting sun sink behind the ocean.

“But you can’t not read it. We have to be informed citizens. This evolving catastrophe is history in the making. Someday students just like us will have classes, even degrees on the 2020’s and be learning about our times.” returned Teddy.

“If there’s still a world by then.” Pepper sighed nonchalantly. My stomach churned a little. The end of the world felt like an all-to-real possibility right now.

“Guys, can we just focus on the positives maybe?” I suggested, drawing lines through the condensation on my diet coke.

“Like what?” said Pepper, rolling her eyes to me. They were so blue and her hair was so pale. I didn’t have a ready answer.

“I read an article this morning from the University of New Mexico about microplastics in the brain. The average person inhales, inhales, 74,000 microplastic particles a day. I mean this stuff is in the air, not just in our plastic bags and clothing. And they’re finding, like, that it messes with the brain’s immune cells. The plastic is altering our brain chemistry in ways we don’t understand yet.” Teddy steamrolled, his soggy white take-out box sitting forgotten on his khaki slacks. “I mean, they could be killing all of us and we don’t realize it yet.”

“Yeah,” chimed Pepper, digging aggressively into her chow mein with the cheap wooden chopsticks. “And if the microplastics don’t get you, all the toxic non-stick cookware will.”

“Or the flame retardant on fabric furniture, parabens in your shampoo, aerosols from cleaning products –”

“Or a new disease epidemic, long-term effects of medications –”

“Nuclear war, civil war –”

“Economic collapse –”

“Fentanyl –”

“Mass shootings –”

“Plane crashes –”

“Electric blackouts, extreme weather phenomena –”

“All the chemicals in ultra-processed foods –”

“Contaminated drinking water –”

“Glyphosate –”

“Red meat, the keto diet –”

“Rising cancer rates and inexplicable heart attacks in the young –”

“Aspartame.” Teddy’s face was suddenly next to mine and his buggy eyes magnified by his hockey-puck glasses were looking intently at my diet coke.

“Ok stop, just stop!” I yelled. Pepper and Teddy stared at me. I looked back at them.

“Teddy, is that time machine still for sale?”

February 5, 2026

That conversation in the van was the final, anxious straw, and consequently how we found ourselves on a sunny Wednesday sitting around in some random garage. The time machine was sitting in the middle of our strange circle. Pepper was perched on an old oil drum, and Teddy sat musingly in a pile of cardboard boxes, his fingertips pressed together in front of his mile-thick glasses. Opposite me sat Alan, the owner of the time machine, dressed inauspiciously in cargo shorts and a polo. His white sock and sandal clad feet were kicked up on a case of bottled water. It had been silent for a long time.

“So let me get this straight.” resumed Teddy, tapping his fingers together. “The time machine has two settings.”

“Correct.” assented Alan. He seemed normal enough, with a normal voice, a normal house and a head of white hair that would normally belong to a 78-year-old.

“The first allows the time travelers to chose the point in history to which they want to return,” Teddy paused.

“And the second automatically sends the time traveler to the best time in history to be alive.” finished Alan, nodding slowly. Our eyes never left the object in the center of the circle.

“I dunno folks. I think this old guy’s taking us for a ride.” said Pepper flatly. “I mean, it’s a lawnmower.”

She wasn’t wrong. The time machine among us was indeed an old lawnmower, or looked very much like one. Alan, however, was unperturbed.

“Well, let’s give it a try then,” he said cheerfully, lurching forward from his lawn chair. “I’ll get her started. By the time you kids have decided on a time destination, it will be warmed up and ready to go.” He pulled on the chord several times and the lawn mower sputtered to life.

“Been a while since I used her!” said Alan as it settled into a low hum, and he plopped down again.

“Ok, it’s time to get down to business.” I said resolutely. “Where and when are we going?”

“I’ve got an idea.” blurted out Pepper before Teddy could grace us with his historical wisdom. “The medieval times, I’ve always wanted to do the whole castle and jousting thing.”

“No.” said Teddy, pushing up his glasses. “Too much war, and disgusting hygiene standards. Castles would have been cold and drafty anyways, as well as noisy and crowded. The food would have been bland, especially if you were a peasant. Who knows who we would be when we arrived. We wouldn’t be nobility, ergo, we’d be peasants, and we would be subsistence farmers, with no rights and maybe even enslaved. And it would be even worse for women –.”

“Ok, so no castles.” sighed Pepper.

“I think about the 50’s a lot. It just seems like a nice time to be alive. There wasn’t any internet, and people seemed to really connect with each other and care. Food was real, and education standards were higher.” I said. Teddy all but laughed.

“It might be nice for you as a middle-class white woman, wouldn’t be so nice for me.” he scoffed. My face flushed a little at my ignorance; I had been friends with Teddy for so long I sometimes forgot he was African American. “Besides, it would depend on where you lived. For example, let’s say we picked 1955. If we showed up in Los Angeles, it would be great and we could go to Disney Land the day it opened. If we showed up in Sudan, we’d be in the middle of a civil war. If we arrived in Argentina, we’d find ourselves in the middle of a coup, but if we turned up in Austria, we’d be celebrating the end of military occupation and the formation of a sovereign state.”

“Don’t forget the lead paint.” chimed Pepper.

“Wait, Alan, can we decide where we go with the time machine, or just the year?” I asked.

“It’s a time machine, not a teleportation device.” Alan replied.

“So, we’d just end up exactly where we are right now, but in a different time.” mused Pepper.

“More or less.” Alan yawned.

“More or less?” said Teddy incredulously. “What do you mean.”

“Look, it’s an old time machine, and I may have missed some recall notices. At times, there are glitches, and then you could end up anywhere in the world. But don’t worry, the time will be accurate, it’s the geographic features that can go haywire.”

“I don’t believe this.” groaned Pepper, rubbing her face.

“We have to be very careful deciding which year to go to. It has to be stable everywhere in the world, just incase we end up somewhere we didn’t intend to go to.” said Teddy gravely.

“What about 1900.” I suggested. I didn’t want to admit my deep and pervasive love for Downton Abbey lead to much day dreaming on my part of living in the early 20th century.

“We still wouldn’t be able to vote Jackie.” said Pepper from the oil drum.

“Plus, if we’re going to live the rest of our lives from that time on, both world wars would be coming, and the influenza epidemic.” replied Teddy. “There’s the Anglo-Boer war going on in South Africa, civil unrest in China and a bubonic plague outbreak in San Francisco. Not the most stable year.”

“I want to be a pirate!” cried Pepper banging on the drum. “Teddy, when where the pirates afloat?”

“Well pirates have been around for much of history.” I said. “But you’re probably thinking of pirates around the time of the 16th and 17th centuries.”

“Imagine guys, the three of us aboard one of those ships! The smell of the sea, swinging from the rigging, the occasional cannon blast. I could get a parrot and maybe even a peg leg-” Pepper was fully engrossed in her dream when Teddy cut her short impatiently.

“Pepper, this is history we’re talking about, real history, not the Pirates of the Caribbean. The 1500’s were some of the most tumultuous times in history. War, slavery and above all; the black death.”

“Wait.” I said excitedly, a new idea germinating in my mind. “All the bad stuff in history, most of it is caused by people, right? What if we went to a time before people?”

“Like the Jurassic period?” asked Pepper. Teddy cocked his head.

“Not a bad idea. There’d be dinosaurs –”

“I’m in.” said Pepper definitively.

“But the climate of the middle Jurassic period would be much warmer, and the carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere would be 7-10 times higher than it is now. Not to mention the obvious danger: getting eaten by a dinosaur.” Teddy said.

“That’s true, and now that I think about it, there wouldn’t be any preexisting infrastructure. We’d be starting from scratch, and we don’t have the knowledge to know how to survive in that virgin environment.” I conceded.

“Yes, that’s exactly the problem with my idea. I think one of the best times to be alive would be when humans were still hunter gatherers, before the development of agriculture.” said Teddy. “But we’re suburbanites. We don’t know how to live off the land, and life would have been uncertain and hard. We’d be exposed to every element and predator with no modern weapons or medicine. We’d be completely at the mercy of the earth.”

We fell silent, beginning to doubt our great plan to escape the evils of our times by going to a different one. It seemed no matter where you went, evil would always be there waiting for you.

As we sat, contemplating time and space and the existence of evil, the time machine abruptly stopped. A light on the top lit up and began to spin slowly. Alan uncrossed his legs and stood up with a tell-tale “welp” and a slap on his knees.

“Where are you going?” I asked. “What’s going on with the machine.”

“I’m sorry kids, but you took to long deciding. It’s gone into setting two: auto pilot.”

“Wait-” said Teddy, and looks of horror spread onto each of our faces. Though doubts remained about the time traveling lawn mower, even the remotest chance of getting spat out into a random time, no matter how “perfect”, was terrifying.

“Alan!” screamed Pepper. “How could you not have told us this sooner!” Teddy was on his feet holding his head in his hands, spinning this way and that in a crazed pacing.

“No no no.” He mumbled. “It’s impossible. There’s no time in history that would be perfect for all three of us.”

I pleaded with Alan to turn it off, but he had his hand on the door of the garage.

“I’m sorry Jackie, I can’t turn it off. The glitches –”

“Stupid glitches!” I gritted out, clenching my fists. “How did this all happen?” Alan looked me straight in the face.

“You spent too much time thinking about how you might die, and not enough time thinking about how you might live.” He winked at me, then stepped through the door and shut it behind him.

Panic saturated the garage, and the three of us ricocheted around the room like pin balls until the light on the infernal lawnmower slowed and came to a stop. We stood around it, hardly daring to breath, wondering what our new reality would be.

“Did it work?” Pepper whispered.

“Dunno, shh.” Teddy whispered back, holding up his hand in response to a rustling outside the garage door.

“Holey socks it’s a Dinosaur.” whimpered Pepper. Teddy motioned furiously at her to stay quiet.

“Pepper! It’s not a dinosaur, we’re still in a garage, we couldn’t have gone that far back in time.” he whispered.

“So it’s true,” I said half dazed, “The peak time of all humanity was actually the 90’s.”

“What?” asked Teddy. Before I could explain the garage door groaned and scraped as it raised slowly, and the sunlight streamed inside, temporarily blinding us. I think some of us, maybe all of us, screamed, but the only sound we heard in return was laughing. Alan laughing.

“You kids are really something.” He chuckled as he shuffled back into the garage.

“Alan?” asked Teddy, scrutinizing him.

“Yes.”

“You don’t look any younger.”

“That’s because I’m not.”

“We didn’t go anywhere?” asked Pepper?

“No.”

“I’m sorry, what just happened?” I asked angrily, beginning to be annoyed that we had, in all probability, just been conned by Alan from eBay. I could tell from Pepper and Teddy’s faces that I wasn’t alone. Alan could read it there himself. He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes, then spent a good deal of time observing the pavement.

“The perfect time to be alive is elusive,” he started slowly. “but any time can be good if you have the courage to see it. The solution to your problem kids, isn’t time travel, because the real problem you’re trying to escape is far deeper than time, it’s beyond time, and so is the solution.”

With those enigmatic words he shuffled back into the gloom of the garage. Pepper snorted.

“Some solution Alan!”

Alan came shuffling back. He held two books in his hands.

“Read this, it might surprise you.” He said, holding out a thick, leather-bound book.

“A Bible?” laughed Teddy. “You’re kidding right?”

Alan held out the second book. “If you won’t read that, then give Robinson Crusoe a try.” he smiled.

The three of us trudged back to Pepper’s van.

“Noone can ever know about this.” I said solemnly.

“Agreed.” said Teddy.

“I think Alan is a bit of a crackpot.” grumbled Pepper.

“A bit?” I said sarcastically. Strangely though, I felt relieved that we had been fooled. Somehow didn’t want to be anywhere else but here and now.

“I guess we still don’t know if the time machine is real or not.” said Teddy.

“Seriously Teddy?” I sighed.

“Well, if the present day really is the perfect time to be alive, then the cosmic lawnmower might have actually worked. There’s just no way of knowing.”

Our faces didn’t need words to communicate to Teddy what we thought of the “time machine”.

“Alan?” I asked, turning around.

“Yeah.”

“You said it’s been a while since you used the time machine.”

“Uh-hu.”

“So, it’s real, or…?”

All I got was one of his enigmatic winks. I shrugged and walked on before turning around again.

“What’s the light for, on the lawn mower?”

“For when I mow at night, obviously.”

“Crackpot.” said Pepper under her breath.

February 6, 2026

Dear Mom and Dad,

Did you get my last letter? If you did, sorry for my poor choice of words, everything’s great here. If you didn’t, burn it.

Love

Jackie