1. Sliding Sideways


    Date: 8/22/2015, Categories: Fantasy & Sci-Fi, Author: BradleyStoke, Rating: 4, Source: LushStories

    although you are just the man I’ve always wanted to meet. All my life, in fact.” Despite himself, and aided by the alcohol, Quentin blushed. “I just don’t believe that…” “You’re right. You’re not the only one to be ‘sliding sideways’ through space and time as you call it. In fact, I don’t have a term for it. It’s my life as well, you know. My life has been exactly the same. It’s just I’ve never met anyone else the same as me in that respect.” Quentin shook his head violently and squeezed his eyes tight. When he opened them, Vivienne was still there. “You mean you’re like me? Every day you wake up and live in a slightly different world, subtly changing and mutating?” Vivienne nodded. She opened her cigarette packet and put another Marlboro Gold Tip in her mouth. “It’s not always gradual. That’s why I asked about nuclear war. I spent a whole week in a kind of post-apocalyptic world. It was horrible! I had to eat rats and wear a lead-lined coat. That Ronald Reagan went just a little too far with his threats against the Soviets in the Pakistani missile crisis…” “I remember that. It was touch and go, as far as I remember.” “And then President Brezhnev, the senile git, called Reagan’s bluff and it was fireworks! I wasn’t there for the crisis, but I was there several years later. But the thing is it happened suddenly. One moment I was living in this student squat in Hackney, the next minute in some nuclear wasteland. But when I came out of it, that was sudden as well. I was ...
    walking through some woodland trying to avoid some thuggish scavengers, and when I emerged at the end, it was by a motorway, only instead of it being empty and overgrown with mutant grass, there were cars driving along it, just like there’d never been a nuclear war. As I guess there never had been. I was fucking delighted, I can tell you!” Quentin shook his head again. “And I thought the Cuban Crisis might have become the big one!” he exclaimed. “But I’ve never met anyone else who knows what it’s like, not so much living in a nuclear wasteland, but living each day in a different world. I thought I was alone.” “So did I!” admitted Quentin, who himself was falling in love. At last! After all these years, he had discovered for sure that there were others who knew what he knew and lived the life he lived. “So, how did you first discover things were like that? I was in my teens when I first realised. As you grow up, there are so many changes you don’t realise that some are not to do with the other changes that happen to everyone. You know, milk teeth falling out, your shape changing as you grow older, puberty, all that stuff.” “I guess it was in my teens, too.” “When I tried telling people they thought I was mad. Sometimes, I was taken to see a psychiatrist. But what I discovered was that pretty soon after I told people, they seemed to forget. The people I’d told, my parents, my friends, my teachers, just didn’t have the same memories as I did. Eventually, I realised that it was the ...
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