Molly was convinced the crocodile at the zoo had spoken to her. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn't remember the voice it used. But the words were unmistakably clear:
"Watch out for the pink truck."
It had said this, then slipped back into the water.
No one else around her seemed to notice. She felt she was in no position to bring it up. After a final headcount of the children, she signaled to the bus driver that they were ready to return to school after a lovely field trip.
"Watch out for the pink trucks," she said half-jokingly, meeting the driver's puzzled expression with an awkward grin. She laughed, as if she'd meant to say something funny but failed to land it.
She sat in the front row, staring out the window as the bus pulled away. Come to think of it, she had never seen a pink truck in her life. Any pink vehicle, for that matter, was rare. As the trees passed by, her eyes wandered, and suddenly she became aware of their roots burrowing into the earth, splitting and branching.
She looked up at the sky and saw what might have been a star—or perhaps a planet. In her mind, it fractured into glittering fragments, each one aching to be whole again.
The bushes along the roadside blurred and danced, streaking into gradients like strokes from a paintbrush. She noticed the veins on a leaf in sharp detail just as the bus came to a stop. Somewhere, maybe far away, something was splitting. A bite taken from an apple—but never chewed, never swallowed. The chunk simply vanished.
A banner on the roadside flashed by. She could swear she read what she thought she did, no matter how little it made sense: "Forget about the pink truck".
Her heart quickened. She wanted to react, to do something—but no plan presented itself. The incomprehensible had arrived. And all she could focus on was how every single strand of her hair was separate, individual. Funny, she thought, how no one ever said hairs.
She was aware of the strange disobedience of her own mind. She couldn't think about what she should be thinking about. What pink truck? What was happening?
But instead of answers, only more questions pressed against her chest, yet strangely they felt inaccessible. Her thoughts fixated on the fork in the road ahead of the bus. It reminded her of that famous English poem. When the driver chose one path, a cool breeze swept in through a window crack, and she felt a quiet sorrow. A subtle grief for the road not taken. A loss she couldn't name.
A week later, she heard the news: a terrible car accident had taken place nearby. A pink truck—driven by a drunk man and painted for a soap brand advertisement—had veered off the road and struck a woman's car, killing her on impact.
Years later, Molly would hear of the woman's husband. He would go on to win the Nobel Prize for his ground breaking theories on space and time.
And one day, she found herself in his office.
"You couldn't save her?" she asked.
He shook his head, heavy with guilt.
"Could you save me?"
Another shake.
"I'm in the same boat as you," he said. "Split between God knows where. Theoretically, we're both in four places at once. Maybe more. The only thing I've learned is this: do not meddle."
"Is four the number of times you went back to save her?"
He spoke as if he'd said it a million times.
"Yes. The first time was a complete misfire. You got dragged in by accident. The second was more precise. She received the warning and managed to avoid the pink truck. But you—pulled into the chaos—spotted the truck, followed it out of curiosity, and ended up crashing into her. She still died."
She sat with that. Let it settle.
"Which is why you came back a third time. To tell me to forget about the truck".
"That, yes. Though it was a foolish attempt. I wanted to test if the same outcome would emerge with different circumstances. You still followed the truck. You still crashed into her, but manner of the accident changed slightly, even though the result stayed the same."
He looked away.
"That was the important bit in my study of space and time—the plausibility of the inevitable. I concluded she was unsavable. Time would find a way to kill her."
"Then why go back a fourth time?"
"To clear your name. You were never meant to be part of this. It was all my doing. By then, I'd refined the process. I still couldn't travel back physically, but I'd learned to send messages through… certain senses. It's more to do with the mind—how time is experienced within it."
He paused.
"Attempt one was the worst. The message was delivered a week early, and not to the intended target. And it came out of a crocodile. But by attempt four, I had much more control. I was able to change your schedule slightly—just enough that you never crossed paths with the pink truck at all."
"And as expected," he went on, "time still delivered the executioner's blade. The manner of the accident changed, owing to many butterfly effects from my previous three visits. But the outcome remained the same."
"Then why did you stop trying?"
"Failure after failure. I accepted she couldn't be saved. And…" he sighed, "I began to feel something inside me break. Each trip back split me further."
She nodded slowly.
"I think you've felt it too," he said.
"Yes. A feeling of not actually being here, even though I am" she said, "a detachment. Subtle, but screaming. Muffled, yet impossible to ignore."
"I believe every change I made created a new timeline," he said. "And our consciousness—our soul—is singular. But to sustain these parallel realities, our awareness was divided. Into four. Maybe more. Our minds can't fully access what our soul knows. Do you understand?"
"I feel it more than I understand it," she said. "I see it everywhere. It haunts me. I'm just an unlucky victim, aren't I?"
He nodded once, barely there.
"I wanted to end it all," he said, "but I had to wait for this conversation."
"What happens to the rest of you when this version of you dies?"
"I don't know," he whispered.
She looked him in the eye. "Could you go back one more time?"
"There's no use."
"Then kill me. Go back and kill me before I ever got pulled in. This… emptiness—it eats me alive. Now that I know what it is, it feels even more real. But also more dead."
He looked at her with eyes that had seen too many versions of her.
"All three of us died," he said softly, "the moment my words entered that crocodile, I'm sorry."