theme: favourite, title: the star of the show in misc. flash fiction

“What was he like in your timeline?” one asked. “Well,” the other whispered, “I certainly don’t remember him being this fat.” They thought I couldn’t hear them, but I could, every single word.

Most wouldn’t know them for dimension-hopping tourists, of course. The travel-service thought of everything, costumes ordinary for the time and place, crash courses in our accents and dialects to better blend with the crowds. This was a vacation for the posh, no mere Carnival Cruise, more like our millionaires paying billionaires tens of thousands of dollars to fly into low-Earth orbit.

That’s how I finally noticed it, years ago now, the way the people at the periphery of my life seemed awkward in their roles, moved stiffly in their clothes, riding the bus in the fashion of those who have no idea how to ride a goddamned bus.

The little mistakes were obvious once I started looking, but that’s the whole point, if you don’t look closely, they seemed like anyone, so why bother to look closely? Chronoskimming isn’t cheap, it isn’t like a ninety-dollar ticket to Disneyland, that even a working person can save up for it. The born-rich have all the subtleties of a broccoli fart in an elevator car. The only ones worse are new money, more like bad wine and scotch eggs. They think it’s easy to inhabit the roles of their “lessers” for a day but the moment you start to pay attention, they fail miserably.

They don’t know how to be real people.

I put it together over the years, from snatches of their whispers, from the fake identifications and travel brochures the idiots dropped. In one timeline, they said I was a senator, in another, some popular film actor. In a third, a rock-star who overdosed before the tender age of thirty. It seems every other choice I could’ve made in my life would’ve led to “greatness” but somehow here, I missed out and so the tourists come here from fifty-thousand other timelines to check out the one where I ended up just some schmuck. These rich little bitches and bastards find it funny and sad.

So, I stage my own bravissimo show for them, I step on the boards and to mess with their heads, I’m cartoonishly plain, I stumble and fumble, exaggerating my plight. It’s the only fame I’ll ever attain so I take my command performance and I give them a story to take home to their friends.

Their childhood idol, fat and old, bumbling through checking eggs at the grocery, what a laugh.

Sometimes I wonder if their visitations are what locked me into my failure, kept distracting me from doing whatever the hell would’ve propelled me to greatness. Sometimes I wonder if I just imagine it all, if I was just crazy. Christ, I wish this was madness, but I can hear the whispers, it just turns out I’m the worst kind of famous. I’m just a pale imitation of everyone’s favourite.

Last updated February 19, 2020