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Driftwood in the Sea of Time

By Wendy Nikel

They’d warned us about the paradoxes, but humanity has always had a way of ignoring the things we don’t want to think about and disregarding the parts that don’t align with how we want the world to operate.

One minute, you’re a self-assured time traveler from the twenty-first century, flashing up and down along the timeline with your TimeBand™ on your wrist, and the next, you’re stuck here, bobbing among the driftwood.

---

My TimeBand doesn’t even blink anymore. Saltwater drips from between its tiny seams when I pull my arm out of the water. But I hold onto it, like I’ve held onto so many broken and worthless things over the years, clinging to a futile hope that someday, I’ll figure out how to fix them.

That’s what got me into this mess in the first place—wanting to fix what was long-broken. Wanting to go back and repair all the cracks in that day. Patch up the scratches. Sand out the edges. And I thought I’d had it all figured out.

I’d spent the past year slipping in and out of time unnoticed, taking notes and measurements and photographs of furniture in its original condition so that, when I returned to my present, I could restore the pieces to like-new in my shop. How much harder could it be, I’d begun to wonder, to just slip Ky’s epi-pen in his pocket that day, like I should’ve done before we set out into the woods? So long as I didn’t see myself, no one would be any wiser.

Sure, it was against the TimeBand rules—they had a list of forty-two, bolded in their waivers, to legally absolve them from “paradox-related incidences”—but like most things in life, it’s always someone else’s problem… until it’s yours.

---

The sea is calm today. It reaches out to infinity in every direction, bending and twisting like a mobius strip so that, if you swim far enough in any direction, you’ll eventually find yourself among the same pieces of debris you’d left behind.

“No running away from your problems here!” one old drifter calls out each time someone new tries.

As for me, I can’t count how many times I’ve passed that awful hornet’s nest with its layers and layers of regurgitated fibers. There’s no hornets anymore, though I couldn’t tell you for sure if they’d all grown tired of buzzing around and drowned, or if they’d ever even made it here in the first place. Either way, each time I see it, I check to make sure Ky’s epi-pen is still safely tucked in my pocket.

I’ve been clinging to a piece of hull from a ship called the USS Cyclops that floated past what feels like ages ago. Before that, I’d straddled a bobbing wooden box, until I’d noticed it was the same shape as a coffin.

There’s an abundance of clocks amid the wreckage, each one running at its own pace and marking its own seconds with discordant tock-tics and its hours with resounding gongs. Their misaligned minutes are a constant reminder of what got us stuck here in the first place: the hubris of thinking we control time. That it owes us more than we owe it. Floating among the timepieces are other pieces of detritus, gathered from who-knows-where across the ages: doors and tree branches and curio cabinets and tables, rocking chairs and staircase banisters.

But the bit of the Cyclops serves its purpose, which at this point is merely to keep me afloat. I was never a strong swimmer; that was Ky’s thing, and after he was gone, we’d fled to that realm of concrete and skyscrapers, leaving things like lakes and hornets in our past.

“Where are you from?” another drifter calls out.

I pretend not to hear rather than admit that I’ve been here so long I’ve forgotten the name of the city. I’ve forgotten most things, except the reason I’m here. I wonder, if I were to continue drifting for centuries, millennia, eons, if I’d still recall the way the pine needles had crunched beneath my feet, though I’d tried to be so quiet. The refreshment of the summer breeze blowing off the lake. The terrified look in my own, ten-year-old eyes as I spun on the log and saw my grown self, trying to slip the epi-pen in my brother’s pocket. Followed by the buzz of hornets, echoing from within the log.

Then the ripping sensation of the paradox that blew my world apart.

---

I spot the raft as the sun is turning red and beginning its slow dip into the sea, pulling a blanket of star-speckled night down with it.

I don’t know, when I spot it, whether it could possibly be the same one that sat out on that lake all those years ago, but it looks the right size and shape, with the same metal rungs on the side. A pile of debris forms a scrambled silhouette along one side.

Maybe it’s because of nostalgia for our old raft, or maybe it’s because I’ve been treading water for so long that the thought of lying someplace dry makes me want to sob, but I abandon the piece of the Cyclops and dig deep into my muscle memory to find the front stroke I’d used that summer as I tried to keep up with Ky. Stroke after stroke, I slowly make my way there, and by the time I reach the raft and pull myself up, I’m gasping and aching and wondering how that lean, rough-and-tumble kid I’d been when I was ten managed to get so out of shape.

In the dimming light, I don’t even realize there’s someone else on the raft until she speaks up. “This piece is taken.”

The ocean breeze dances shivers across my exposed skin. Generally, us drifters follow an unspoken pact that basically amounts to “possession is ten-tenths of the law,” but now that I’ve pulled myself from the freezing water, I can’t imagine diving back in, especially as the sun is setting, stealing every ounce of warmth.

“There’s plenty of room for two,” I try.

“Don’t matter; I was here first. And besides, I’ve got big plans for this here raft.”

Big plans?

“We’re drifters,” I scoff. “We don’t make plans. It’s our plans that got us stuck here in the first place.”

“And that,” she says, rising to her feet, “is exactly why there’s no room for you here.”

I glance around the raft, taking in what she’s wrested from the sea: quilts, laid out flat to dry; wooden boards, stripped of their nails, which rattle in a glass jar each time a wave rolls by; strings of Christmas lights; a car battery; a hubcap.

“What is all this?”

“I told you, I have plans.” She sits back down on a stool, which wobbles furiously beneath her weight. And in those wobbling legs, I see opportunity.

“I could fix that for you.”

---

Her name is Raven, though when I ask, she hesitates too long before answering, making me wonder if she doesn’t remember, or if she just doesn’t want me to know. She’s young—probably no older than seventeen—and she doesn’t wear her TimeBand, though I can see the faded line on her wrist where one used to rest. I don’t bother asking where she’s from, and I know better than to ask how she got here. Most of the night, we work in moonlit silence: her sifting through Time’s flotsam, while I do my best with what she rescues.

Before the sun rises, I’ve fixed her three-legged stool and sorted through the boards she’s collected. Some have been drifting too long; the sea has broken them down so much that, even without knowing what she intends to do with them, I know they won’t hold up.

When the sun rises, we use the quilts to pitch a lean-to across one side of the raft. It’s the first time since the paradox that I’m able to rest in the shade, and in doing so, I find that not all the things I’ve lost are gone.

“St. Paul,” I say aloud, just to hear it roll across my tongue.

“What’d you call me?” Raven asks.

“Not you. The city. That’s where I’m from. I thought I’d forgotten it, until now.”

Raven nods and turns back to her task: tying a piece of string to a stick.

“What are you making?”

“Fishing rod.” She nods toward the edge of the water, and I realize, for the first time, that there are schools of fish swirling around the raft. Their shadowy forms pass in and out of sight, fading as they dive toward the endless depths. I lean over the edge and watch them dart about; how have I never noticed them before?

“We’ve got some PVC pipes,” I say. “I’ll show you how to make some with those; they’ll hold up better than those little sticks. My brother Ky and I used to make them all the time when we were kids.”

Raven looks at her makeshift rod, then at me. “All right. Let’s see what you can do.”

---

When the sun sets again, we cook the fish on a grill I build from some bicycle spokes, copper wiring, and the overturned hubcap. The fire within it crackles pleasantly, its embers rising to meet the stars. I don’t know how many days or weeks I’d gone without food, just that I ought to have died long ago and that, once I taste that first bite of fish, my stomach groans in relief.

The smoke attracts the attention of another drifter, who floats toward us, clinging to a Peterbilt hood. His eyes reflect my own hunger, so I call for him to climb up—to take a rest and some food.

“What the hell are you doing?” Raven hisses. “This isn’t your raft to offer.”

“No, but at least half the fish are.”

She scowls and settles onto the stool while I give our newest companion a hand.

The hollow-cheeked man says his name is Mike and that he was a down-on-his-luck trucker whose gamble didn’t pay off.

“Tomorrow’s lottery ticket?” I guess, and the sheepish grin beneath his whiskers tells me I’m right about his violation.

“As soon as you’re done with that fish, you’re gone,” Raven says. “There’s barely enough room for two of us on this raft; I’m not about to make room for three.”

We mutter our agreement, but as we pick at the bones of our fish, setting aside the fatty bits to use for bait, Mike lets out a hearty chuckle at Raven’s look of disgust, and I realize who he reminds me of: my Uncle Ian. Uncle Ian wasn’t there that summer Ky got stung; he had moved to Topeka a few months before. He was a trucker, too, with a hearty laugh and wild whiskers and hollowed-out cheeks and a highly mechanical mind and the best Christmas light displays in his neighborhood.

“Sure wish we could get that car battery working,” I say aloud to Raven. “We could string some lights in the lean-to and keep working even when the clouds block the moon.”

“You want me to take a look?” Mike asks. “I’ve worked on my fair share of batteries; I might be able to get it purring.”

Raven scowls but trudges over, grabs the battery, and hauls it into the firelight.

“You know,” I say, smiling, “if we could rig up a platform for it, that truck hood would make a fine loft bed. What do you say, Ian?”

“That sounds just fine.” A smile breaks out on his face. “The name’s Mike, though.”

“Right… Mike.”

---

When Mike manages to get the battery working, the raft becomes a beacon of warm string lights. I keep an eye out for the drifters who wearily paddle our way, clinging to bits of their past. With grilled fish and boiled rainwater, rest and conversation, we all start to find our purpose. We all begin to remember.

“Was my dad who taught me to sing,” one young guy named Sean says after finishing a rousing sea shanty. “Nobody ever would’ve guessed it—he was always so quiet, so serious—but he’d serenade my mother with show tunes every night as he scrubbed the dishes.”

“Tell you what,” a rosy-cheeked woman named Sara replies, “you teach me that last song, and I’ll show you how I seared those fish. Wouldn’t Chef Absil be thrilled that I’m finally putting my culinary degree to good use!”

The conversation flows easily, lightly, following a rhythm like the sea. We give, they take, and then somewhere the tide turns, and we’re wondering how we ever got along without them. Without Mandy’s stand-up comedy routines. Without Lula’s skill in building rain-catchers. Without Matt and Quinn’s bulging muscles to haul up pieces of driftwood and hammer them in place, building platforms and extensions and second-story levels.

The only one who doesn’t seem to open up—who sits alone while the others laugh and swap tales into the night—is Raven. Instead, she finds the extension of the raft that’s farthest from the little circle and spends her evenings pretending to be asleep.

I know she’s faking because when I climb up beside her onto the hood of the Peterbilt one night, her eyes are wide open, reflecting the stars.

“I know this wasn’t exactly what you planned,” I say by way of apology. “If you’d rather be alone, the rest of us can leave. There’s got to be other rafts or rowboats or something else where we can rebuild. I just… I don’t want to forget again.”

I don’t want to forget Uncle Ian. Or Mom. Or Grama. Or Tim, my third-grade best friend. I don’t want to forget the songs, the stories, the books I read in college. The joy of sanding out a rough piece of wood and making it into something beautiful. I don’t want to be adrift again, barely keeping my head above water.

“Don’t worry about it,” Raven says. “Your idea was better anyway. You’re saving people, giving them a second chance. The problem is, I wanted to forget.”

---

We pull the quivering man from a turtle-shaped kiddie pool and haul him aboard. Though we still refer to it as “the raft,” it’s become so much more. There are nooks and crannies for people to sleep in, a kitchen, and a slowly growing library. Sheryl teaches yoga from atop three interconnected pallets, and Jeff’s even started a lifeguard training course.

The newest refugee is bleary-eyed and dehydrated and can’t even remember his own name, but after a few days of our standard rest-and-recuperation routine, his memories start to return. But when our new companion Alec tells us that he’s a TimeBand technician, the entire circle falls silent.

“You don’t mean… you know how these things work?” Mike asks, lifting his wrist.

Around the raft, folks stare down at their devices. I stop working on the new table leg I’ve been whittling and glance at my own TimeBand; I haven’t even thought of it in days—or has it been weeks? Or longer?

Suddenly, Raven’s at my side, her arms crossed over her chest.

“Can you fix them?” she asks.

---

A few days later, Alec attempts to explain what he’s discovered. “Each TimeBand contains a tiny nuclear reactor. It seems that when we’re transported wherever this is—a pocket universe, I suspect—the sudden change in pressure causes the reactor’s cooling tanks to malfunction. They’re programmed to shut down to prevent a meltdown.”

“So, if you were to get them working again…” Raven prompts him.

“Here? That’s impossible.”

“Because you don’t know how?”

“No, that’s not the problem. But I need a workspace—”

“Use my desk,” I offer.

“And a magnifying glass—”

“Find me some clear bottles,” Priya calls out. “My mom was a glassblower, and she taught me some things; I can melt them down to make one.”

“And tools. I’d need tiny tools, for meticulous work.”

“Would my dental set work?” Dr. Oppenmeyer asks.

“And a Bunsen burner.”

Mike steps forward. “I could rig something up.”

“Anything else you need?” Raven asks, and when he only sits there, agape, she repeats, “So if you were to get them working again…?”

“I should be able to reset everyone back, but the data from each TimeBands will reset, too, so you won’t be able to return to the exact time you flashed. You may lose a few days or weeks… Months, maybe…”

I think of my shop. Of all the piles of antique furniture, just waiting for me to pick up where I left off. And on my front desk, the gilded frame containing the photo of me and Ky, taken that summer, just weeks before he died. I touch the epi-pen in my pocket, which somehow had lost some of its heaviness over the past weeks and days. I look out at the glassy sea and wonder how many people are still floating out there, somewhere amid the driftwood and debris.

“That’ll do,” Raven says, brushing her hands off on her jeans. “How long will it take you to get all these folks back home?”

---

Once the equipment is gathered, Alec works fast, and one by one, the TimeBands resume their blinking. The time travelers—no longer drifters—accept the others’ teary farewell hugs, press the button, and disappear, each one leaving the raft a little quieter, a little less crowded, a little more somber.

When my turn comes, I thank Alec and fasten the TimeBand to my wrist. Its face stares up at me expectantly. “You folks go on ahead,” I tell the others. “I just want to fix this chair.”

Soon, it’s just me and Raven and Alec left, eating the last of the fish around a campfire that feels oddly cold.

“Well, Raven,” Alec says, “you’re the last one. Once we get your TimeBand working, we can all head home.”

“Then you’d better just go.” Raven rises to her feet and tosses the remaining fishbones into the water. “I threw mine in the sea.”

“What?” I exclaim. “When? Why?” And why didn’t she say anything before?

Raven smiles wryly. “The moment I got here. That was my big plan. You folks were all over the news—all you TimeBand owners who violated the rules and just disappeared. And I figured, if it worked for you lot, why not me, too?”

“But why?”

“Why does anyone run away from home? Pressure. Frustration. A lack of peace and quiet. My little sister Tara always getting in my hair. Dad bugging me about applying to college.” There are tears in her eyes, and the fire flickers in them like tiny bursts of anger. “I just wanted to be alone. To not have to worry about anyone else.”

“And now?” I ask.

A glimmer of starlight slips from her eye. It paints a wet line down her cheek. Her voice, when it comes, is barely audible. “Now I just want to go home.”

I look away, out across the water, and in the moonlight, I spot something round, the same size and shape of that stupid hornet’s nest. The epi-pen is heavy again in my pocket.

The clasp on my TimeBand sticks, but I tug on it, and it comes off.

“I can’t take that,” she says when I offer it. “You’ll be stuck here!”

“And you’ll be back home where you belong.” I turn to Alec. “How long do you think it’d take you to teach me how to fix those TimeBands?”

Alec is taken aback, but he considers. “You seem pretty sharp, and you’ve got a steady hand; maybe a few days, if we really work at it? I suppose I could stick around a bit longer.”

Raven’s still slack-jawed, so I take her wrist. It’s so small, it reminds me of a child’s. Of my brother Ky’s, that summer at the lake. I clasp the TimeBand onto it.

---

I’m not alone for long. There are always others, struggling among the driftwood. I offer a hand up. A smile. A fish. A place to rest. And while I putter with their TimeBands—I’m nowhere near as quick as Alec—my guests find small ways to improve the raft.

Monica weaves a rug from scraps of cloth. Kurt rigs up a camp shower. Phoenix writes a volume of poetry they name Pocket Universe Pages. And one by one, as they come and go, they leave the raft a bit better. They leave me a bit better, too.

And then, suddenly, they stop, like someone’s fixed the world’s leaky faucet.

I wait.

I read poetry and catch fish and build a set of cabinets. I snag the hornet’s nest and string it with lights, like a paper-mâché chandelier. I wonder about the others, dream about them at night, and hope that they all made it back. Hope that, wherever and whenever they are, they’ve managed to find their peace.

---

When I spot her drifting, I don’t believe it. I wonder if I’ve had too much sun. But there she is, her spiral-curled hair dripping, and when I pull her up to the raft she smiles, looks around, and says, “I like what you’ve done with the place.”

Over the next days, we catch up, and Raven explains everything.

“As soon as Alec got back, he started fighting TimeBand, trying to get them to fix the reactor so people wouldn’t end up stuck here. They argued that it was a natural consequence—that if people could just flash back after committing a violation, there’d be nothing to deter them from trying again. It went all the way to the Supreme Court, and we tracked everyone down to testify: me and Mike and Sara and Mandy and Quinn, and all the others, too. We had to argue that we’d learned our lesson—that we weren’t just rogues determined to break the timeline. That we’d all just made a mistake, and that without you, we would’ve been stuck here forever.”

“Me? It’s you who gave us a place to stay, and it’s Alec who fixed the TimeBands.”

“But you’re the one who brought us all together. Who helped us remember.”

I shift in my seat, uneasy with the praise. “Did Alec convince them to fix the TimeBands?”

“No,” Raven says, “even better. Once the public heard what happened to us, they pushed to have TimeBand shut down entirely. We held protests outside their factories, met with their suppliers and distributors, and eventually applied enough pressure to put them out of business. Then we introduced legislation to outlaw time travel altogether, so no other company could take it up again.”

“How did you end up here, then?”

“Special permission, from the very top. It’s a rescue mission.”

A rescue mission. It hits me like a tidal wave, leaving me watery-eyed and gasping. I look around at the raft, at the home I’ve made of it, filled with memories of all the people who—according to Raven—I’ve helped.

“Do you need a minute?” Raven asks, as if just realizing now that this might not be easy for me. That I might not be ready to be rescued.

I pull Ky’s epi-pen from my pocket for the first time in who-knows-how-long, and for a moment, I merely stare at it. Then, with a quick snap of my wrist, I toss it into the sea, where it bobs, ever so briefly, before sinking.

I let Raven clasp a second TimeBand on my wrist—a new model, more waterproof and pressurized—and the stars glimmer in her eyes as she whispers, “Ready?”

I’m ready.

And the last thing I see, before the flash comes, is that papery-white hornet’s nest, sparkling brilliantly in the dark.

---

Host Commentary

By Tina Connolly

So get ready to grab your TimeBand (TM) … because it’s storytime.

---

And we’re back! Again, that was Driftwood in the Sea of Time, by Wendy Nikel, narrated by Kyle Akers.

I loved the delightful and whimsical setting of this story. It’s a shipwreck story, but a shipwreck literally out of time and place. Clocks bob through the water. So do Christmas lights, and fish. Which–you don’t have to eat, no matter how long you’re there…but it sure tastes good when you finally do. And then, of course, there’s the flotsam and jetsam of lost people. And I love the way our narrator starts collecting them, the same as the debris. Hauling them onto the raft, helping them find memories and purpose again.

I also really like the way different people change and grow over the course of our story. Raven ran away, wanting to get lost–but by the end of the story she’s healed, and ready to choose to go home. (And choose to come back to rescue our protagonist!) The others, also, presumably atone for their mistakes in this time travel limbo river, and heal. And our hero chooses to stop forgetting, chooses to start rescuing people and bringing them onto the raft even when there seems like nothing in particular to live for. And then our hero chooses to finally let the hope of the changing the past go, to accept what happened, and go home.

Escape Pod is part of the Escape Artists Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, and this episode is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license. Don’t change it. Don’t sell it. Please, go forth and share it.

How do you share it, you ask? Well! In addition to your social media of choice, consider rating and/or reviewing us on podcast listening sites, such as Apple or Google. More reviews makes for more discoverability makes for more Escape Pod for you.

Escape Pod relies on the generous donations of listeners exactly like you. And remember that Patreon subscribers have access to exclusive merchandise and can be automatically added to our Discord, where you can chat with other fans as well as our staff members. So! If you enjoyed our story this week then consider going to escapepod.org or patreon.com/EAPodcasts and casting your vote for more stories that finally get to go home.

Our opening and closing music is by daikaiju at daikaiju.org.

And our closing quotation this week is from Tennessee Williams in The Glass Menagerie, who said: Time is the longest distance between two places.