One Day: A Narrative Fiction

Duncan pulls into his driveway leans over to grab Penelope’s hand, presumably to apologize, and she doesn’t react. All she can do is sit there and start off into oblivion. Somewhere in her subconscious she registers that the engine had stopped, she opens the door, and slowly maneuvers out, and back into her house with no intention of ever leaving again. She crawls into bed without thinking, undressing, or greeting a single person and falls into what she can only assume is a coma. A couple hours later she wakes up to a quick and shark rapping knock and her bedroom door and her dad asked her to come with him. She agrees and instead of being greeted by his fresh farmer’s omelet as she could only expect, she’s greeted by two badges, handcuffs,

and the back a squad car. As emotionless as possible, she slides into the back seat without saying a word or putting up any semblance of a fight and doesn’t shed a tear, nor look back to see her father in disbelief in the driveway and Duncan peering out from behind the blinds with a face as white as a ghost from next door.
At this point Penelope has completely lost all sense of reality. She doesn’t know where she is, what’s happening, or what had happened. She does what she’s told, and follows the body in front of her. She has no idea how long had passed, but her dad shows up and she assumes he must’ve bailed her out. She follows him out the front door and climbs into his car. The two get home to a warm dinner and the color begins to return to Penelope’s face and she told her father everything. From her friends standing her up, to the dry clothes, and cold steel blade. Her father’s face mirrors hers as it was just that morning standing in the backyard of the Tregenna estate. He grabs her hand and leads her into the basement, he tells her he has something to show her.
She follows him down the steps and into his corner study.

She sits down and waits for his cue. Her father promptly looks at her swearing her to secrecy and tells her if ‘they’ every find out he has this, it will be the end of ‘everything’. He rises from his desk and slides his desk to the side to reveal a door in the floor, he opens the hatch and together they crawl down. He turns on the lights and Penelope cannot believe what is in front of her. She remembers the design vaguely from when she was just a kid and her parents would disappear for hours at a time and spend many sleepless nights hunched over the desk in that very study. They would tell her it was a magic machine for when very bad things happen in the world, people can go back and try again. She had not heard of this magic machine in almost a decade, since her mother died. Yet, here it is, in all its prospective glory. A crude, generation 1, time machine. Penelope is still in disbelief when her father tells her to grab the rods on one end of the machine and put the craniometer on. She slowly starts to with little protest. It is apparent her father is in a rush and she has no time to question it. He enters the data he must and rattles off quick instructions. Type in the time and date of where she would like to go. He warns her she only has one chance at this. Her body will walk out the other side so long as she maintains contact with those rods, but a copy of her, a doppelganger would be created and sent back to

this exact place, at whatever time she must be. Lastly, under no circumstances, may she interact with her original self. Penelope begins to walk
She closes her eyes until she feels the weather change. She no longer feels the muggy, old dust ridden room that is her father’s secret lab, but that quaint 60 degree night she felt barely 24 hours ago. She knows it must have worked but is still scared to look up because she believes as soon as she sees the starry sky and the world in all its glory, there would be no going back. Seconds later, after several deep breaths, she does. She looks around and gets her bearing and begins planning. She must get to the party that much is for certain, but how is a huge question. First she needs a dress and a masquerade mask. She finds the back door as to avoid her original self and walks past her father who seemingly knows to continue at his crossword puzzle in his recliner without questioning how his daughter walked out the front door and in the back just seconds apart. She climbs up into her room and pulls down a tight black dress and slides into it. Several tugs later she picks up her shoes and heads for the front door. A cab is waiting there for her, her father must’ve called ahead and Penelope makes a mental note that if all of this works out he has a lot of explaining to do. She heads to the party and walks in no problem past the same security guards with the same bulges on their hips under the guise her masquerade mask with several other girls who had obviously been pre gamming a little too hard. Doppelganger Penelope does not hesitate when walking directly past the drink tables, she must find Duncan. Her plan is if she can distract him long enough, he will never meet Dana, Dana will never fall, and Duncan will never have to cover up his involvement in her death. Crisis averted, problem solved, the world will once again be as it should.
Doppelganger Penelope finds Duncan within the hour with plenty of time to spare and engages him in quick conversation. He offers her a drink and to avoid suspicions she accepts and continues the conversation. It goes in circles making continuous small talk, until Duncan pauses on her dress, and through his drunken state, inquires as to how and why she changed from the red gown he picked her up in. She begins to feel dizzy, Duncan reaches out to steady her and whispers “I know what you’re up too Ms. Banks, but you cannot stop this.” She stumbles away dazed and confused, he had to have drugged her, it’s the only explanation. Maybe Dana’s death wasn’t an accident. If she wasn’t, maybe the other two weren’t. She has to find original Penelope.
She traces back her steps from the night before and finds original her making small talk with a couple strangers and approaches them asking them if they wanted to dance under the cover of her masquerade mask. She cannot allow her original self to recognize her as she is now. This is the last thing she remembers. The drugs had taken over her nervous system, doppelganger Penelope had blacked out. She wakes up the next morning to the sun shining brightly in her eyes through the second story window out of her bed. She sits up abruptly and looks around. She failed, Duncan killed those 3 innocent people, and she had helped. She buries her face in her hands and cries. Then she feels a hand on her thigh, it’s soft, and delicate, and she grabs it and looks down and realizes what had happened. She locked eyes with herself. After blacking out her original self, had served as her own nightcap. Penelope ended the night with herself. Her mind is working at a million miles an hour trying to put the pieces together. If she is here, that means she isn’t in the police station, which means, maybe the night wasn’t a lost cause, maybe Dana survived, and Duncan failed. The woman on the ground speaks to her in a soft voice and begins to explain. In her drugged state, doppelganger Penelope had revealed everything to original Penelope and they went and promptly had security escort Duncan out when they found two poisoned blades in his jacket pocket. The lives were saved. Yet, something didn’t feel right. She had met herself, slept with herself, things couldn’t be right.
They weren’t. Her father’s warnings were there for a reason and she realized this soon enough. The world had begun to collapse on itself. This new timeline was essentially an alternate universe and it could not be stable since the two Penelope’s had met. They created a rift, an impossibility, a paradox, and the rest of the world would suffer because of it. They were to discover a new world together. One that did not follow the guidelines set forth by the one they knew. Life had begun to decay, as time began to rip. It began in small doses. Clocks became unreliable, computers short out and eventually ceased operation entirely. Tropical storms became more frequent and pushed north as the cold receded. Sinkholes would appear, and people would disappear. It was the worst case scenario of the fabled butterfly effect everybody learned about growing up. Everything is connected, and when something suffers, or changes, everything does.
It had been 5 years since everything changed. Penelope and Penelope had grown accustomed to this new world. They moved back into the house they grew up in with their father and proceeded with their lives. They made sure to never show their faces in the same place at the same time to avoid further suspicions, but otherwise led completely normal lives. They rarely saw their father, all he would say is he had work to do and would disappear into his laboratory under his study for days at a time. Penelope’s father like all other men had developed a terminal cancer that attacked the Y chromosome. In an attempt to assimilate the world and restore order, the universe had attempted to create as many similarities as it could. On the frontier of this effort is the reductive decay of the human genome. In turn, the fundamental effort is to create as many similarities as possible and led to the corruption of the Y chromosome creating a genetic, terminal cancer. Men were to become eradicated from the world. This alternate universe could not exist and Penelope had to fix it.
She is forced to wait three weeks for the perfect moment to mask her travel back to the turn of the millennia to stop herself. Using the cover of a thunderstorm, her father had retreated to his room for the night and she sneaks into his laboratory and finds the old, generation one time machine, and attempts to recreate what her father did that night so long ago. She hears the whir of machines and could only hope the rift had not touched this technology as it lay dormant, she should have a window. The rods just out of the side just as she remembers, she squeezes tightly and types in the moment that she could never forget. Closes her eyes, and waits for that rush of cool air, that perfect night to canvas her once more.
She opens her eyes in 1999 and understand what must happen. She has already made enough mistakes and made all of humanity pay the price. She must do it herself. She must allow Duncan to murder Dana, and allow herself, to murder the last two men on the beach. However, to do this, she must take out her original doppelganger otherwise, she, the second Penelope, will successfully rip the universe once more. She must kill herself. The third Penelope watches as the first sneaks out the front door, and the second sneaks in the back and waits an hour. As the second Penelope wanders out in the tight dress, she walks through the front door to speak with her father. They lock eyes, and in an indescribable way, she understand that he knows. He knows, everything. She moves toward the kitchen and pulls a steak knife out of the drawer and walks out the front door without saying another word.
The third Penelope had forgone all the nuances of the ball, and headed straight toward the coast of St.

Ives. She quickly sneaks in and finds the bedroom that she almost ended up in with Duncan two lifetimes ago and perches, waiting for the second Penelope to come through the door. She doesn’t have to wait long for the second Penelope and as soon as she sees her, the third Penelope makes her move. She heads downstairs and every step gets harder and harder, her legs are getting heavier. This universe cannot support 3 copies of the same person. In an attempt to save the world, she is about to tear the universe into a fourth slice and she instinctively knows there would be no coming back from that. Her walk turns into a sprint as she grabs the second Penelope from behind and buries the steak knife deep into her back. The world stops and all eyes focus on her. The second Penelope is dead and the second universe dies along with her. No terminal cancer, no tropical storms, no failing technology, and two complete genders. All that’s left is to leave. The first Penelope cannot see this one, or all of this would be for nothing as an endless cycle would commence. She turns and sprints for the front door. Nothing else matters, she is prepared for the murders to occur, and to spend the rest of her natural born life in prison. All these thoughts, plus a million more are running through her head when she turns the corner for the last stretch before the door. The third Penelope stops cold

in her tracks and locks eyes with a pair of warm, hazel eyes that look much too familiar.