The time traveler's wife

John peered out from his cubicle. Down along the rows of small office spaces, he could see his fellow colleagues all unclamping their nipples and ejecting their video cassettes from the VCRs that sat adjacent to their monitors. They seemed to enjoy their work. Most looked relieved like they had just finished a marathon.

Some joked lightly as they stacked their cassettes, making light of the poor weather and last night’s upset. Most were cynical, quite adamant that The Team never had a chance in the first place. Noone at all seemed surprised or even upset by the result.

John hated football. Not for the sport itself, but for the social obligation. Listening, though, to the murmurs about him, he quickly realized that how they felt about the upset was how he had felt about himself. It was how he had felt about his life, about his job, about his thinning hair and his flabby body. It was how he had felt about the size of his penis and about the tufts of grey hair that had just recently sprouted in his nose. It was how he had felt about the things he had wanted to do his whole life but had never got around to. It was how he had felt about his garden and his scabby cat and it was how he had felt about his wife.

It was how he had felt, until now.

And then, as quickly as his colleagues had packed their cassettes into hard cover casings, each unwrapped one more, loading them into the VCRs before reattaching the cold steel clamps to their nipples and starting another task; the filling of another silver pail.

Most had seventeen cassettes piled on top of one another. It was an average, what was expected by working at an average capacity. John looked around at his work station. His table was empty except for a Diet Coke and a picture of his wife, from when she was younger before he knew her. She didn’t know that he kept that photo and he’d probably never tell her. And though it seemed innocuous, keeping this exact picture, it felt like something that she wouldn’t understand.

He sat there staring at the picture of the woman he never knew and he imagined what she was like before the first time that 16