Faces in Time Read Online Free PDF

between the two sets of double exit doors. It’s too perfect; it even has a lid. For the first time in his life, he feels the power of a trashcan.
    The ludicrousness of it makes him want to smile, but his frantic neurology only allows a quick twitch at the corners of his mouth. To be able to test his ability to change past events and to get rid of the evidence of his crime so easily grants him an unusual appreciation for the cylinder nearly filled with plastic cups, stale popcorn, and play programs from the night before that are mostly rolled into tight little tubes and crudely constructed airplanes.
    The lid fumbles out of his nervous left hand and falls to the gym floor. The hat’s rim bounces off the curved walls of the trashcan, wobbling to a stop on top of the refuse.
    The lights flip on suddenly, and he jerks his right hand away from the garbage grotto. Bending quickly he grabs the lid.
    Approaching footsteps pound on his eardrums, and his heart beats as fast as the overly-generous clapping hands. Two of the hands aren’t clapping, and one lands on his left shoulder.
    He drops the lid atop the trashcan and turns quickly to see who has grabbed him.
    “Are you alright, pal?” asks a tall, slim man in a gray suit that hangs off his wiry frame.
    Chester’s mouth and tongue commit one false start before saying, “No, no, thought I was gonna vomit. Where’s the bathroom in this place anyway?”
    The man’s head bobs in verification, “Yeah, I thought you’as sick by the way you’er staring so hard in there like you lost your whole life or a ring or something. Sick or you had lost something—I knew it had to be one o’ the two.”
    Chester leans forward and puffs his cheeks out as if regurgitation were imminent.
    The man

    Chester lets out an interrupting, “Than— ,” and puffs his cheeks again. If only some of the actors on the TV shows that he wrote for would have been so convincing.
    The man in the suit takes a step back from Chester’s swollen cheeks, and then watches Chester as he makes his way toward the bathroom.
    As he steps toward the hallway opening beside the front of the stage, the clapping is finally starting to subside itself. He can hear adolescent feet clomping across the wooden platform; the children must be finishing with their curtain calls. He looks over his shoulder back at the trashcan that he hopes will prove his fate can be changed.
    The tall suit has left, must have wanted to beat the traffic.
    Chester can see the woman in the front row glance with wide eyes at the seat to her left. She looks under her chair and then stands to look around the floor of the immediate area. Lastly, her gaze rises higher at about hand level, and she scours over the crowd.
    Some groups of people make their way to the stage, and others quickly walk toward the front of the gym area that is serving as the lobby and file into two lines, one through each of the double exit doors.
    The hatless woman’s appearance begins to tear at his chest as it no longer looks on with anger, but it quakes with violation. He suddenly feels horrible for taking it from her. He thought it would be a very harmless method of testing his ability to change the future. If the picture in the paper tomorrow comes out without the hat being in it, he’s proved his theory. No one would be physically hurt, nothing of much monetary value would be stolen, and he wouldn’t have revealed some type of a secret that would draw attention to himself and be dangerous to others.
    There are not many subtle ways to distinctly change the future, be able to prove you’ve done so, and cause such minute harm; yet, he still feels guilty.
    He sees a woman with red hair walking toward the trashcan from the left line of exiting people. The crimson reminds him of the one he’s come back to be with—the one whose future he wants to change for the better. She walks with a drink in a paper cup topped with a plastic lid and a straw. He watches her lift up the