The Butterfly Effect

He says yesterday is history, tomorrow a mystery, and today a gift. That is why they call it the present.

He believes this because he lives in your tomorrow. His past is your history; his present is your past. His life is a mystery to you, and merely surviving in your time feels like a mockery beside all he has seen and done.

But this is not a story about wisdom. It is about a twisted mind with its own twisted logic. Before I rewound these events, I made the telling chaotic. I spat the story backwards because backward thinking takes no one forward.

This is his story.

The journey

I mastered time. I learnt to cross the distance between past and future, and on one journey ahead I witnessed the death of my only son.

You caused it.

Not directly. You were thousands of miles away when a single action of yours set his death in motion. Distance did not absolve you. Time did not soften the result.

So I travelled sixty-three years into the past to erase you before you could exist. I would kill your grandmother before she gave birth to your father, and your whole bloodline would vanish.

I reached the hospital moments after her waters broke. Your grandfather met me at the entrance, shouting for help. I opened the maternity ward doors for him, then followed at a careful distance as attendants wheeled her towards the operating theatre. He was stopped outside. I scrubbed my hands, approached him with a reassuring smile and said everything would be all right.

Inside, a nurse demanded to know who I was. I knocked her unconscious.

Your grandmother lay beneath the theatre lights, dazed by medication. As I approached, she looked at me and spoke. Something in her face and voice struck me with an impossible familiarity. I pushed the feeling aside. My identity did not matter, and neither did hers. I had come to end a sequence before it began.

Your grandson would one day destroy my family.

My son had ended a long-distance relationship with a woman who loved him. Heartbroken and distraught, she lost control of her car. The crash killed him. His own mother had died in childbirth, and I had raised him like a prince, yet I had failed to teach him how to treat another person with care.

People say a man who treats his woman like a princess proves he was raised by a queen. I had raised my son as royalty and taught him nothing of kindness.

Still, I blamed you.

“Nothing personal,” I whispered.

I drew a silenced pistol, aimed at your grandmother’s abdomen and fired.

The correction

The room convulsed.

Blood climbed from her wounds and slipped back beneath her skin. The bullets tore out of her body and returned to the gun. The weapon leapt into my pocket. The theatre dissolved around me, and time dragged me into a memory I had buried.

I was fifteen again, lying in the dirt after a snakebite. Venom burned through my body. An elderly woman knelt over me and drew the poison from the wound, saving my life.

I recognised her.

She was the woman I had just murdered.

The past corrected itself with perfect cruelty. If she died before my birth, she could never save me. If she never saved me, I could never grow old, master time or father the son whose death had driven me backwards.

My borrowed future collapsed.

Life drained from my body as my older self merged with the dying boy I had once been. The son I had tried to avenge disappeared with me. He had never existed.

Neither had my revenge.

The universe did not need to punish me. It simply removed the hand that had tried to rewrite it.