Misthrown

Through unfocused eyes, Sophia stared at the blurry face of her target. Slowly pushing the held breath out of her lungs, she allowed her vision to sharpen, the small red dot becoming the sole purpose of her vision. Her next steps were ritualistic: drawing back her arm, catapulting it forward, releasing. Yet, she stumbled forward, oddly off balance, as the dart flew through the air, its trajectory anything but straight.

With a too loud clang, it hit the thin metal frame and ricocheted off the board and into the vast array of potted plants waiting out the winter in the corner of the basement.

Combining bourbon with a side glass of red wine was not ideal for her dart game. However, it did make for a fun, albeit fuzzy, Saturday night.

Kneeling to grab the rogue projectile, Sophia pushed aside the fading magenta and maroon leaves of the Coleus, seemingly sunbleached despite actually begging for more light. Cursing the cheap Amazon grow lights under her breath, she picked up its catch tray, swearing that was where the misfired dart had landed. Looking under it, in it, back in the plant, under it again, before shifting the whole sad-looking leafy pot to the side, and peering behind the gargantuan terracotta that housed her night-blooming cactus. She couldn’t find it.

Next thing she knew, her head was level with the carpet, stretching to see between the jungle of pots and trays with her lovably curious dog sitting on her back, doing her best, despite being entirely unhelpful.

“Where is it?” she mumbled from amongst the foliage.

Placing his drink on the table between the asparagus fern and overgrown Jade, her current boyfriend, Austin, knelt next to her, confident that it had fallen into the Coleus pot. The one she had already looked in. His quick search came up empty-handed, rising as he joked, “Maybe in the spring you’ll have a dart tree.”

Sophia huffed, not allowing herself to audibly laugh at a joke that bad.

“Or you never threw it, and we’re in a different timeline,” offered Theo from the far end of the room. “Quick, someone Google who the president is!”

The noise that now escaped her fell at the intersection of a Venn diagram of laughter, fear, and anxiety, prompting a curious stare from the two men now leaning up against the basement bar. She did her best to shrug it off, but all of a sudden, her world felt off-kilter. She groped the table behind her, finally grabbing her wine and finishing it in three gulps in short succession.

She began to take stock of the room around her, her heart thundering in her chest in clear juxtaposition to the demeanor she was outwardly presenting. The wine rack was filled to the brim with cheap wine, many of them $8.99 Kirkland Malbecs, thank you, Costco. The gray couch was still pulled two feet away from the wall to sit “closer to the TV,” per her boyfriend's request, with a large dog-shaped dent on the ottoman.

A snag in the carpet by the bar. Scratch down the door to the garage. A recent photo. Keys on the hook. Gray blankets … two of them.

She continued to index the basement, taking stock of anything that wasn’t quite right. But to her wine and bourbon-addled brain, everything seemed in place.

Despite this reassurance, she knew there was a non-zero chance that her reality was not the same one it had been when the dart had left her hand. She needed confirmation, one way or another. And she knew how she could get it.

Kyle. She needed to talk to Kyle.

Theo and Austin were now fully distracted by the football game. Ohio State vs Indiana. Parked on the couch, pulling up DraftKings and FanDuel to see what bets were hitting and which parlays were still alive. Completely oblivious to the creeping crisis happening on Sophia’s side of the basement.

Well, it might be happening.

For all she knew, the dart was just stuck in the dirt, and she was too drunk to find it.

Leaps like these, the ones that weren’t immediately noticeable, these were the ones she hated the most. It could be days, or even months, before she realized her so-called reality was not the one she’d been living in. One day, she’d open a Christmas card, and it would be from a family she’d never heard of. Sending her on a scavenger hunt, looking for clues to understand what reality she was actually in. Who she needed to be.

Big changes were easier, instant. When a whole person was gone. Or, suddenly, she was standing in a new place. Over the years, she’d learned how to play it off, lean into the situation at hand, and melt into her new surroundings.

Once she’d come home from a friend's house to a new brother. Older than her by quite a few years, but a good brother. One who would take her putt-putting when asked to babysit or let her stay up and watch movies with him. She liked him right away, but, unfortunately, it hadn’t lasted long.

“You bet the under right, babe?” Austin called out as Sophia entered the peripheral of his vision to head up the stairs. “Uh-huh,” she replied, taking the steps by two.

Reaching the top, she heard Theo say “nice” in that way he does when he’s had too much to drink. All but ignoring the N, adding an O, and holding on to the S for dear life. Shutting the door to the basement behind her, she began to take stock of the kitchen.

Chip in the tile.

Crack in the ceiling.

Busted nail in the plaster.

Freshly painted cabinets.

Dutch oven on the stove.

Magnets. The Museum Center, Pearl Harbor, Acadia, Yellowstone, Keystone … Keystone?

She hadn’t been there. In its place should be a rectangular magnet mimicking a retro postcard, “Greeting from the Grand Tetons!” Instead, there hung a rounded, octagonal image of a mountain range with a deep orange sky. “Keystone, Colorado” in teal blue script.

Her heart was now in her throat, making a serious bid to escape her. No matter how many times this happened to her, the anxiety came the same. Pulling her phone from her back pocket, staring at the imposter on her fridge, she dialed by memory and waited as the phone rang, and rang, and rang.

If he’d felt it too, he would have answered, or already called her. But maybe he didn’t. This one seemed small.

She hit redial. Again. And again.

Finally, on the fourth call, an annoyed voice answered; she could hear the loud cacophonous sounds of a crowded bar around him. She shook her head; he hadn’t noticed.

Kyle was the anchor to her universe. Not a singular universe, but whichever one she was in. He was, too. Why … Neither of them knew.

They’d realized they each had been shifted through timelines or planes of reality, whatever was happening to them, in parallel back in high school. Thanks to a fateful trip to Blockbuster, they had figured it out.

It was a Friday night with no major plans. The pair had roamed the desolate video store, arguing over their movie selection, popcorn, and candy for over an hour. Their compromise had been The Italian Job, Red Hots, and popcorn with movie theater butter.

Yet back in Kyle’s basement, the movie that began to play was not the one they’d chosen. Assuming some previous renter had simply put the wrong DVD in the box, Sophia was shocked to find the case was for The Matrix. She’d vetoed that one. And the popcorn and Red Hots had been replaced with an assortment of candy, no popcorn in sight, which, to Sophia, made for a pointless movie night.

Kyle knew that about her.

“I could have sworn we got popcorn,” he’d said with an intensity that didn’t match his statement. “We did …” she replied, trailing off, unsure of exactly what was happening.

From then on, every jump, glitch, and shift, they had managed to hold onto each other. By purpose or by fate, they didn’t know. All Sophia knew was that as long as her version of Kyle was in her world, it would all be okay.

“Hey, it’s me,” she replied, before sharing their code phrase, or two-factor authentication as Kyle now called it, “Bit of a candy rush going on over here.”

“What?”

“Kyle …”

“Yeah … And who are you?”

The world around her started to spin, and the phone slipped from her hand, falling to the floor. It was then that she saw the number she had dialed wasn’t saved in her phone … six unclaimed digits staring up at her.

She could hear his voice still coming from the phone on the ground, a small crack now down the middle of the screen, mimicking the real-time fracture happening in her reality.

Her knees hit the floor, pain barely registering as she picked the phone up off the floor, “You don’t know me?” she said, though half of a sob.

“Have we met before?”

Unable to speak, realizing for the first time she was alone in this timeline, alone in this universe or whatever it was. Kyle had always been with her. And now he didn’t even know her.

Without her response, the line went dead and Sophia began to shake.