Cleo is a carefree art history student. When her disturbing nightmares start having a parallel in her life, she finds herself witness to a most unexpected heist. In hot pursuit of the master criminal, she finds herself sucked into the vortex where h...
A seagull swooped down as Cleo stared at the departing gondolier, forcing her to duck to avoid the bird. The mist of the early morning had mostly lifted by now. It was also starting to warm up a bit. All good signs and thank god for that, Cleo mused to herself.
St.Mark's square is iconic of Venice and features in many a Hollywood movie made on its shores. When George Clooney married Amal in 2014, it provided the ideal backdrop for the paps who besieged the city and the area around the Grand Canal. St.Mark's also makes the news for a different reason each year – when Venice gets flooded, it's usually the very square that bears the brunt.
During a typical summer's day the square is overflowing with tourists – and pigeons! – eager to check off bucket list items, the tourists that is and not the pigeons. Topping the bucket list is the church that occupies pride of place and from where the plaza gets its name. It was fairly early for the masses to show up, yet there were a few early tourists indolently strolling along the water's edge, trying to get the best shots and selfies from all possible angles.
It was then that Cleo observed a strange object – it looked like one of those film cameras from the 80s she'd recalled seeing in some photographs of her parents when they were in school! And then Cleo began to notice other things too she had missed out earlier. For instance, the clothes people were wearing, their hair, their shoes, and the more she scrutinized details, the longer the list became. Why was everything feeling and looking retro like they had all gone back by a few decades in their sartorial tastes?
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Image credit: Brittanica.com
Befuddled Cleo peered inside a just opened convenience store, the kind that is really a tourist trap selling all kinds of tacky souvenirs but also keeps other daily use items, to see if she could get her hands on a calendar. She spotted a number of them to the left of the cash register and hurried over to them. Some had aesthetically taken pictures of Venice, while there was another which captured different types of boats one could spot in the canals around the city.
After a quick Scusi to some tourists milling around and their two kids who were busy haranguing their parents over buying them some candy, she picked one up to confirm the date. The year printed on the calendar was 1980, and the month printed was September. Cleo heard someone exclaim rather loudly and realized it was none other than her. Everyone was now looking towards her with curiosity to understand what had elicited that reaction from her.
She was in St.Marks square in Venice and it was September, 1980!!
An involuntary shiver ran up her spine as she digested this piece of information silently. Muttering an embarrassed apology, Cleo hurried out of the store.
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