Taboo

Keywords: to, A, Reality, Journey,

"This story does NOT contain any sexual acts or indications, which is why it is appropriately placed in the "Non-Erotic" section. Please do not read it if you are expecting any. This is an emotional tale of a young woman who takes a journey back in time to learn the truth about her own beginnings, and gets a new outlook on things as a result."

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"Just let me use it once, Graham."

"No, I need to do some more testing. I'm not even sure the device is really safe."

"But it does work, and you've used it with no problems."

"Only twice," he flashed a wry grin, "and besides, it's ok for a scientist to be his own guinea pig."

Crystal contemplated him for a few moments. She didn't believe in being pushy with friends, but this was important. Through most of her life, she and her mother had not gotten along together, and Crystal had believed for a long time that she was adopted. This was her one chance to find out the truth. "Look, I've stood by you through this whole project. I've located components for you, and covered your backside when everyone wanted to know what you were up to in this little basement lab of yours. The very least you can do is let me try it once."

Graham hung his head, and Crystal knew that she had won. "Ok, just ONCE. But you have to do exactly as I say." She smothered a smile as he began to explain the usage of the device that she already knew as well as he did. It was a hand-held apparatus, no bigger than a garage door opener, and it held the power of time travel.

"I haven't had any time to do anything new with it." Graham explained. "All we can do is set the year; no date, no time, no location. It will take you to this exact spot however far back in the past you want to go." He grimaced a bit and adjusted his glasses. "Well, within the past 50 years, anyway."

"It's fine, I just want to see what things looked like around here the year I was born." That was a lie. With three weeks left until her birthday, what Crystal really wanted to do was find her mother and see if she looked pregnant. Since the woman would have only been 15 years old at the time, Crystal sincerely doubted it. "What exactly was in this spot in 1968 anyway?"

"A corn field. Your neighborhood was built in 1966, but mine and everything else this side of Palmer's gas station was still just farm fields back then."

"Palmer's has been around that long? Amazing." She shook her head as she thought about the run-down little station at the end of the street. "Ok, so I come out in the middle of some corn. At least nobody will notice me at first."

"You need to make sure nobody notices you much at all. When you get there, go straight to the edge of the field, right alongside the gas station. You'll see a small bench next to a phone booth. Just sit there and take in the sights."

Crystal gave him a questioning look, followed by a frown. "That's all?"

"That's all, and I mean it Crystal. I have no idea how bad we could screw things up if we changed something back in time, and I don't want to find out. I'm not even sure we should be trodding through the corn stalks."

"Yeah," she giggled "like that freaky time travel story about the guy who killed the butterfly and screwed up the beauty in his time, or something like that."

"Don't laugh, that author may have had a more realistic view than we think." He ran his hand through his hair and continued. "The device will self-activate after exactly 30 minutes to bring you back here, so make sure you're back in the corn where you can't be seen before it does." Graham set the date and then pushed the button to activate the device, which he then handed to her. He pointed to the small blue button on top. "Just push that when you're ready to go."

She gave him a re-assuring smile as he backed away from her, and then she took a deep breath and pushed the button. At first she felt nothing at all, but then an overwhelming sensation of floating engulfed her body and her vision clouded until she felt as if she were suspended in a heavy fog.

Almost as soon as it had started, the fog dissipated until her eyes focused on the mature corn stalks surrounding her, and the pungent smell of damp soil and foliage greeted her nose. She glanced down at her body and verified that she was still in one piece. Aside from a lingering sensation of light-headedness, she felt fine.

Crystal slipped the time travel device into the pocket of her frayed blue jeans and looked at her watch. Graham had said that she'd have 30 minutes before the device transferred her back home, so she didn't have much time to find her mother, even though the town wasn't large.

When she reached the edge of the gas station parking lot, she paused to consider her next move. She knew that her mother had dropped out of school the year she'd supposedly gotten pregnant, so finding the girl that was rumored to be fairly wild may be more difficult than Crystal had originally anticipated. Still, if said girl was truly nine months pregnant, that may have slowed her down a bit.

Crystal decided to head directly for her grandparent's house, which was located only a six blocks away on the same street that her own house was located on in the future. If she didn't find her mother there, then she could always bully Graham into letting her use the device to try again later.

As she hurried along the sidewalk, she marveled at how odd it was to see her own neighborhood so differently, yet eerily the same. In this era, there were no cracks in the clean sidewalks, no litter at the curbs, and every store seemed to glow in its coat of cheerful bright paint. The windows sparkled in the bright sunlight, and a group of bare-footed children bounced past sitting astride some sort of large rubber balls with handles at the top.

She passed a barber shop, which would be replaced by a tattoo parlor in her time, and then gazed at the record store in which she knew that none of the customers would understand what a CD or an MP3 was; their music only blared from the tiny grooves of black vinyl platters. A fresh bakery resided where later a cigarette store would be, and a tiny grocery stood on the corner that would only hold an abandoned building in her own time.

Crystal stopped in front of the grocery store and eyed the soda machine there, amazed at the sign that boasted that a single dime could buy the refreshment. She fished a coin out of her pocket and fed it into the machine, then marveled at the glass bottle that emerged. Yes, things were very different here.

It took her a couple of minutes to figure out how to get the metal cap off of the bottle, and in that time the bell over the grocery store's door jangled as a young girl emerged carrying a small brown paper bag. Crystal froze as she immediately recognized the familiar face of her mother, though thirty-some-odd years younger, and the fact that she was indeed uncomfortably pregnant.

The girl never even looked at her as she crossed the street in front of her, and Crystal stared agog as her mother made her way down the opposite sidewalk. Dressed in flat leather sandals, faded bell-bottom blue jeans, and a loose white angel-style top, she was everything that Crystal had ever pictured a typical 60's teen to be. Everyone besides her own mother, that is.

Feeling vaguely stunned, Crystal realized that she already had the answer that she had come seeking, but some impulse made her move to follow along at a safe distance, curious to know more about this enigma that was so unlike the woman that she had been at odds with for so many years.

She noticed that very few people greeted the girl as they made their way down the street, and that she walked quickly, with her head down so that her long straight hair covered her face.

A school bus lumbered past, and the car full of teenagers following behind it slowed as it neared Crystal's mother. They began to yell insulting remarks at the girl, calling her a tramp and worse, and one of them threw something out of the window at her. The girl dodged the item and pretended to ignore them as she continued walking.

Crystal felt an uncontrollable fury rise to the surface at the scene playing out before her. This was supposed to be the era of peace and love, wasn't it? So where did these kids come from? She broke into a run and quickly closed the distance between them, throwing her soda bottle at the front of the car and yelling a few obscenities of her own at the horrid teens. They stared at her with astounded looks on their faces as the driver gunned the motor and sped away.

She smiled briefly as she thought of what a picture she must have made; a grown woman in attack mode screaming words that only a few sailors in this era probably used. But Crystal's smile faded as she realized that her mother had stopped walking and now stood within a few feet of her. It gave her an odd feeling to look at the girl's swollen belly and know that it was *herself* in there, waiting to come into a world that she would never remember seeing as she was seeing it now.

As the girl turned her sad brown eyes up to Crystal and whispered "Thanks," she felt as if some invisible knife had twisted in her heart. This was not the angry judgmental woman that seemed to devote her entire life to telling her daughter everything that she was doing wrong, nor the woman that Crystal had taken to ignoring and avoiding as much as possible. This was just a scared and sad girl, no more than a child herself, who was already paying dearly for one single mistake and collecting the emotional scars that would last her entire life.

Crystal just nodded at her... after all, what was one supposed to say to one's own mother before they were even born?

"I'm not, you know..." the girl swung her hair away from her face and focused on some point across the road as she spoke.

"Not...?"

"Not what those kids said about me. I only went with one boy."

"Oh?" Crystal ignored the inner voice that reminded her that she'd already done and said more than she should have in this time, but she desperately needed to hear that her mom wasn't the careless hellion that the elder neighborhood gossip had sometimes made her out to be.

Keywords: to, A, Reality, Journey,