Shift

SHIFT (REVISED) - PREVIEW

In the right-hand lane of the Mercury Expressway, puttering alongside a perilous junkyard, wind blew sand against Max's cheek-and it stung-and he had an idea. Yale, not wanting to protest-it was their four-month anniversary of being stranded together, after all-pulled over just as a plume of smoke sent gravel to the side of their RV. He sighed as Max rummaged through their once-present teacher's sling backpack for the miniature projector and unknown movie he once vaguely gabbed about.

"If we run it through here..." Max said, drawing an invisible line on the desert ground as Yale unraveled a long cable cord, "...we can set up the projector in front of there." He gestured towards a heap of rusted storage bins and cars. Neither of them recognized any of the models. It must have been abandoned long before they had.

The air was sickly placid, painted with violent strokes of purple and deep blues. Sand and scorpion tails pelted the edge of the tires in a soothing lull of a familiar night. Cicadas buzzed quietly beside them. Unusually, they said nothing.

Yale put the movie into a side slit in the computer, and it whirred until a small screen popped up that showed him where to click. Luckily, the only damage the computer took in the crash was minor; there was a crack in the corner of the screen and a couple of unimportant keys were missing. The DVD was scratched as much as it had been before.

When it played, thin white bands were strung over the grainy video, which paused and skipped every few minutes. Max was more so disquieted by the loss of what had been recorded than the loss of what he had experienced only four months ago. His eyes glistened with tears before he peeled away from the screen.

"Have you seen this before?" Yale asked.

"No." Max answered, leaning sideways. "I didn't even realize this was the video Langston had brought. But I can't look away now."

This had all happened at the same time the stamp on the video moved faster and faster in-and-out of time, going years ahead in a split second, then travelling back centuries even quicker. Time stopped on XX-XX-XXXX at XX:XX.

Yale felt a great disturbance, as if the billions of voices in the world that had all spoken at once began crying in terror and were suddenly silenced.

A restaurant, full and bustling, glittered with neon lights. Yale studied the vibrant peppermint-themed booths and quickly noted a guitar strumming in the back of the room. It was observed-but not explained-that there were different versions of him and Max littered throughout the diner. Each table represented an alternate reality.

On the furthest to his left, in a pair of rotating seats, sat the both of them in metal padding and burn scars all across their cheeks and necks. The Other Max materialized a hologram with two fingers, and they both played table tennis and drank milkshakes together, speaking in a language he had never heard before.

In the first booth, older versions of Max and Yale sat side-by-side, studiously arched over their identical meals without speaking. In the booth behind them, Another Yale sat with poor posture, wiping blood off of himself with spare napkins. There was no Max sitting in front of him.

Next to a jukebox, Other Max III and Another Yale IV were giggling to themselves as they looked for fast-paced love songs.

"Do you want to hit me, or do you wanna kiss me?" Other Max III smirked, winked, and leaned heavily against the wall in the same sequence a greaser script would read.

Another Yale III-who wasn't wearing any glasses-blushed and pushed against his shoulder playfully.

Yale passed many other versions of himself that did not notice him as he maneuvered his way to the back of the room. He wondered what this all meant, and what time periods these all fell in, or even if they all existed at once in the same dimensional plane outside of this very diner. All of this remained just as ambiguous as when he first entered.

That all lasted a gasp, and suddenly, he could feel each individual one of his fingernails grow in Real-Time. On the roof, Yale kept quiet, swallowing a marble-sized lump in his throat. He shot upwards-choking-as tears stood in his eyes.

Max, who was still sitting next to him, took his face out of his knees and quirked his brow. "Bad dream, huh?"

Yale steadied his breath and propped himself onto his hands. "How long was I out?"

"A couple minutes. I figured you didn't want to watch so I turned it off."

The projected screen was a Crayola blue