Swirling Portal

Karen stared into the swirling portal, the lights reflecting in the whites of her eyes. Streaks of magenta and baby blue spiraled and blobbed like a giant, disc-shaped lava lamp. She had never felt more alone in her life, though she knew that billions of people were behind her, watching her on the other side of those cameras, holding their breath in anticipation, waiting to see what would happen, as pundits commented on the historical significance of the moment. Nearly everyone who she had ever met in her life—her kindergarten teacher, the boys who taunted her and ridiculed her flat chest as a teenager, the first girl she had ever kissed that one time at Adam Rosenstein’s Bar Mitzvah, the boss who fired her from her first job after she turned him down—all of them were there with her, all of them feeling some small fraction of the anxiety she felt in that moment.

There was no going back in time, of course; there would be no portals to receive her in years prior to the invention of time travel. Opting to keep this first experiment conservative, the scientific community decided on a simple five year jump. She extended her right arm into the undulating mass of liquid color and felt a breeze on the other end. She took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and stepped through, feeling the immense weight of all of the recording equipment and monitors that the scientists had placed around her body, and the small camera glued to her forehead.

Karen opened her eyes to a quiet, empty room. The cameras and the portal were gone, and the wall that had stood before her was demolished. The trees and grass that had been outside of the institute had dried up and died, and the sky that had been so blue that morning was covered in a reddish smog. There were no scientists there to congratulate her for her accomplishments, and no TV reporters to interview her, and her wife was not there to welcome her home after her five year absence. She was alone.