Faces in Time by Lewis E. Aleman Read Free Book Online Page A

over-priced boutiques, both wanting the feeling of having found something different than what is consumed by the middle class. It’s unlikely that they would have much to say to each other; nevertheless, they grab at the same items, counting on the purchases to take them to different and superior places.
    The same overpriced lamp might find its way to an apartment or dorm room with black curtains made out of bargain bed sheets and unframed posters tacked to the walls of a bloody Caravaggio or The Nightmare Before Christmas just as easily as it could be placed in a room with high ceilings, a glittering chandelier, and crown molding beside a hand-painted Monet water lilies reproduction framed in gold. One could wonder if either woman would still see any magic in the lamp if she knew where else it could be found.
    Feeling the urge to get out the back seat and the unpleasant memories and thoughts from the previous night, he exits the car and stretches.
    Directly across the street, he can see a bar. The remains of broken bottles line the curb in front of it, their shattered pieces marking the crashing end of its patrons’ reent evenings, and the sidewalk near its double doors is stained a different color than the rest of the street.
    As he glances around absorbing his surroundings, he thinks that it all is a perfect picture from his memory. Not the specific people, the bar, or the stores, but the style of clothing, the speech of the people, the cars, and the signs on the buildings: they are all as he imagined. He has landed in a crisp photograph of his ideal place in time, and now that he can’t change its path, it is one that he knows will leave him hollow.
    It’s not as gloomy as the night before, but also not as bright as the return to the field of his youth. Something about being in the middle of the extremes feels real, be it a real hell, heaven, or a path betwixt.
    Unlike after the failed attempts last night, he feels the urge to investigate his surroundings some more.
    After all, the car and his clothing still make no sense. They were indeed part of his life, but not at this place and time. Even if he is doomed to helplessly watch all of the events that ruined his happiness unfold again, there is something else going on in this trip through time, something unexpected, and that will at least provide something to investigate, a distraction from staring at the dismal future that awaits him.
    Scientific discovery is no longer of personal interest to him if it can’t lead him to her, but discovering the anomalies of time travel is something man has lusted over for eons. For our Chester, it might provide a pillow to clutch instead of the fair, red-maned body he longs to hold and to whisper that she is wonderful and irreplaceable and everyone around her is a terrible person for keeping that from her.
    The worst part of this whole mess for him is that it appears he is helpless to save her from her life of heartache, abuse, and misery. In fact, it looks like he won’t be able to prevent even one of her ill-fated choices. Images of her lovely façade on the other woman’s body and the strange skin attached to her own skull stir up the burn in his stomach.
    Part of him can’t believe it’s so, that she is doomed to that fate. It’s not hard for him to grasp that he is incapable of helping her, but it seems that all the universe is a lie if someone that is so special to him, someone whose heart he is convinced is as pure and vulnerable as a child’s, is forced to walk along such a painful path.
    A small, convertible, baby blue, bubble-shaped sports car pulls up to the curb several stores down the street. A woman with dark sunglasses and a bizarre pink hat that matches her outfit steps out of her vehicle and slams the door with her stretched palm, keeping her fingers from touching it.
    She steps around the side of the car, and even from a half blok away, Chester can hear an animal yapping from the passenger seat. She wraps its