When I made their cheeks dimple for the first time, I leapt across six thousand years in a heartbeat. Time slid beneath my feet like the shards of a broken dam until I rebuilt, shored up, and clambered over it with the infernal boredom of pitting and slicing ten pounds of cherries.

When they asked me my name, a tsunami of years swept me off my feet into a future without scarcity or pain or them. I crawled back to their green eyes and that strand of hair that curled along their brow with the monotony of inventorying a field of haystacks for a single needle. 

Now when they grasp my hand for the first time, twining their fingers around mine and holding my soul in their palm, I graze the heat death of the universe. I gasp on the deoxygenated chip of rock lurching toward my death, remembering the most boring passages from my dullest field guides on the least interesting rock formations on Venus. 

But the cold vacuum plucks at me, numbs every inch of me but where they pressed against my palm. The burn of their touch, the memory of their warmth, tingles and distracts me from the boredom I need to get back to an atmosphere. To get back to them. I try to master myself and fail. I spare a glance at the source of both my supreme pleasure and my asphyxiation. 

I choke on nothingness. They jumped alongside me, cling to me, starve for air with me. My heart judders and I reach for safety, for time, for them.

The horizon blurs scarlet and indigo as Betelgeuse and Rigel swirl across the celestial dome mimicking their passage during the planet’s long extinct seasons. The sky flares into every color and no color until only brilliance remains. The void of a dying universe vanishes, replaced by stony light and the too-tight embrace of beige textured clouds that crush against us like wet sand. No air flits between the grains. My body sinks heavy and weightless in the floating prison. Not even recounting the monotony of monarchical trade deals could break through this liminal future to drag us back to their present.

My lungs squeeze the last drops of historic oxygen into my blood as their grasp loosens. They fade, drift into the beige. I pull them into an embrace, shield them from the unending light. With a sigh, they fold me into their chest. Their heartbeats slow with mine, dying in each other’s arms before our first date or our first kiss or our first fight or our first anything. They brush their lips against the top of my head in a silent goodbye.

My soul slips out of my body and we follow it eons into our future and our past. The sand compresses and sways and reforms into a universe filled with bacteria and water and plants and oxygen and life. We thud against newly formed mud in a heap, stable in a prehistoric present and surrounded by a swift current of fresh water. I lay back against the wet clay and keep hold of their hand, refusing to relinquish them to whatever time stream we’d traversed together. The sun swims beneath the water, dyeing it purple and gold as deep blue stains the sky. The stars pop onto the velvet night like diamonds. Betelgeuse and Rigel sparkle to our North, from the same relative direction where they had greeted us at the end of the universe.

Deep laughter cuts through the sound of insects mating and water lapping at the edges of our island. Their eyes crinkle and those dimples appear with relief and joy. My stomach stumbles, tumbles, jumbles like I had crested a hill. They stroke my cheek and smile. The exquisite joy rumbles me, my stomach cresting downhill as my entire being soars.

We jump forward an eon or three.

I school my mind, force myself to remember which US president served two terms non-consecutively before running through the whole empire’s list of figureheads seven times. It barely keeps me in the moment as they cup my face with their free hand and tug me in close to ask permission to kiss me. Fireworks skitter across my skin and explode as our lips meet. 

The tumult fades to reveal that our island transformed from a pile of river mud to a grassy meadow dotted with poppies and lavender and hyssop and dozens of wildflowers I don’t recognize. I need to stabilize my temporal rate. The deep breath I drag in, laced with the cacophony of floral scents and my companion’s woodsy musk, does not help. 

“I read once that everyone’s sweat has either undertones of citrus or onion.”

They laugh and their dimples rejoin our conversation. But the awkward fact and the sweat (grapefruit-tinged) it inspires on my upper lip keep me in place.

“Of all the—not what I expected.” They shake their head, shaggy hair settling around the triangles that their grin forms with their cheekbones. 

With at least six inches on me, they bend as I crane. Hazel eyes question this unreality they find themselves in, but none of that passes through their lips. I stutter and agonize over how to explain that I travel in time based on my emotional engagement with my surroundings. It’s the kind of thing that you want to explain over a coffee instead of after surviving going beyond the end of the universe all the way through to the beginning of it again. They pull me back into their presence by leaning close and mock-sniffing my neck.

“Citrus, definitely.” They open their arms to the field and swirl. “What about me?”

The playfulness, the sweetness of holding back questions, all of it piles into my heart like a tornado. I lurch forward out of the empty field to a village. A duck ambles across a path etched into the earth with feet and crude wagon wheels. I panic and the duck moves like lightning to the pond on the other edge of the wooden huts. I slow my heart with practiced effort. I list all the mob movies from the 70s through the 90s and try to remember which star led which movie. Time thrusts me back and I flow back to a patch of mud. I remember the heat on my skin as they leaned close, inches from my neck, near enough to kiss—and I find them in the stream. I reach out and tangle my fingers with theirs.

“Citrus, but woodsmoke too.” I wheeze as we land in the coolness of autumn. “Definitely sweet and savory.”

“Let me get another whiff,” they whisper as they lean in and kiss me. 

Their lips, soft as petals, weave together with mine. I wrap my arms around their neck, press against their hardness with my curves. They pull me in close to their chest, grasping my hips as we tumble forward to the village that becomes a city and withers into a ruin until the field swallows it whole and blooms with wild hyssop once more. 

We slow as lines trudged into the grass widen from deer paths to cart paths. It’s fall again. A crisp breeze murmurs against me. Against us.

“You must be curious about all this,” I start noncommittal and unhelpful. I don’t want to break apart this moment into unwieldy explanations.

“A bit.” 

They don’t push, they don’t prod. They wait for me to speak again. My cheeks burn with embarrassment, my stomach roils with nerves. We slip back a few decades and stones push up through the grass where a city had once stood.

“No matter what, don’t let go of me.” I lean back and meet the hazel portals to their soul. “I’m one of the lucky ones, unstuck but in control. Well, somewhat in control.”

Scientists had split the atom just shy of a century before they had shaved down a quark into its constituent parts. Tests had revealed a byproduct, a particle that danced around temporal dimensions like glitter swirling in a snow globe as soon as they observed it. Where there’s a particle, there’s a collapsed wave. This one had flowed through the planet to alter the DNA of a small portion of the population as it deconstructed, blessing and cursing my pregnant grandmother. 

“It hit the mitochondria and warped who it touched. The effect travels mother to daughter now.”

“I’d heard of Shifters, but never met one.”

“Never met one that you know of—when I was born, they estimated us at about 2% of the population, but no one can really count us unless they observe us shift.”

“Wouldn’t I be able to tell if people blinked in and out of existence?”

“Maybe? But I met you outside a shifter café so your radar for us might be busted.”

Global populations may be large, but 2% of humanity is still small enough to encourage community hubs. Shifters glom together in long-lived cities and gentle climes that will forgive a slip in either direction and disjointed reunions. The tabs at bars and café’s in my hometown are maintained on geological time scales.

We shuffle along the path, awkwardness nearly pulling me back a decade. Their hand folds around mine. We settle by the same pond that the duck would wander towards at some indeterminate point in time.

“When did you start shifting?”

Puberty, or some indeterminate neurological milestone, had kicked my mitochondria into gear and spooled the power house of the cell into an engine that could propel me beyond time. There aren’t enough Shifters to know the why’s to all the questions about us, but I believe an inborn defense mechanism stops us from shifting before we can fend for ourselves.

“The first time I won a hand of Russian Solitaire, I went forward in time seven months. I’ve been traveling to and fro for about a decade now.”

“Do you end up in your own time?”

I shrug and run my hand down their pant leg so I can keep contact with them while I sit in the grass along the hedge. Instead of answering, I twist blades with my free hand until milky sap sticks to my fingers. They sit beside me, gaze catching my fidgets with expectancy that forces me to return to the topic.

“When I focus and measure the right level of boredom to excitement, I can usually land on important dates. My Grandma, my Mom, and I, we all try to meet up as much as we can on my Mom’s birthday.”

“How likely are we to get back in time for me to clock in?”

We lay back and watch the stars cycle through the resurrected seasons as conversation and flirting fill a first date perfectly skewed between catastrophe and charm. As my stomach rumbles, we even out and head back to our temporal origin. I sense the moment we had departed nearing like a timepiece swaying half an inch from my forehead, a pressure and buzz against my cells. 

The café perches over me a dozen feet away. A railing of glass and iron separate us from the duck pond and a bench looms above my head after we pop into existence. Safe to disentangle, I drop their hand. They grasp mine tightly and kiss my cheek before springing to their feet. The sun sits high in the sky. No time had truly passed.

“Coffee?”

We amble into the café and a life with them flashes in front of me. Change flits between moments in my vision, a constant alongside love and respect and squabbles and quiet moments. I know, for the first time, how I want to spend my non-linear decades on this planet. Who I want to spend that allotment of seconds with until my final shift.

They turn back, eager to spot me in the crowd. Their smile knocks the breath out of me, the twist of lips and twinkle of eyes. Their slim form and floppy hair silence me. They lean down to kiss me and we fly forward into time. They grasp my shoulders, whisper into my ear the history of the vacuum cleaner and we slink back to the café.

“You’ve got the hang of it now.”

“Disorienting, but complimentary. And a little bit fun.”

“We could keep practicing, you know.” 

I chew my lips and shuffle my feet. I contemplate sinking into the molten core of the planet waiting for a response.

“You took me to the end of the universe on the first date. You’re going to have to really work to outdo yourself for the second.”

I count the beats between seconds to stay in the moment. I bump against their side, hugging them briefly before ordering my usual (dirty chai latte with oat milk) and covering their cortado (no sugar or syrup) with my tab. We sip and chat and plan until the first date melts into the second and third and fourth and fiftieth. 

The first blush of lust, of rapture, fades into a background level of adoration. I no longer skip forward years when they laugh, when their eyes wrinkle. I find a balance in my mitochondrial whirl that I couldn’t have accessed without them brushing back a lock of my hair from my forehead. Spikes of love still prickle me when the sunset frames their curls or their compassion inspires laconic affirmations. Then I recite all the types of subatomic particles until I lurch back to my partner. The quirk of their smile, the understanding of the compliment, pull me back out of time again—but I always drag them along for the second trip.

I cart them along to September 7th, 2043. They meet my mother and grandmother. I’m lucky enough that three of them all get along—and eventually I get to meet my own daughter on that same day several months after I realized that I carried her. I dash back to them, dash forward to her. Our family clutches at these pearls, these moments where we coincide. 

The universe ends and reboots and ends and reboots and ends and reboots. Change and constancy flow together and diverge as naturally as the wander lines that cut through fields will deepen into paths and harden into crossroads and expand into villages and sprawl into cities and flourish into civilizations and decline into ruins and collapse into fields.

Time slips inexorably forward (with derailments to the sides and back) until we lie on that same patch of grass, by that same duck pond nearly a century after we met. I unfurl a blanket to cover the damp earth, to warm our aging bones. The same duck waddles by us on the same path to the same spot. The sun warms my face, shines away my aches and polishes my flaws. We watch and dream and talk and kiss until neither of us does anything again.

This piece was previously published by Viridian Door Magazine.