Fall Back

A Midnight Vault II story

NOTE: Within a few hours, I’ll be uploading audio narration for this one, so if that’s your preferred mode, please standby.

When his alarm went off, he squinted into the warm glow of sunlight pooling on the floor of his bedroom. The maple outside his window was aflame, dropping embers that floated down in lazy arcs. Fall back. A refund in the currency of sleep from Uncle Sam. He had been craving the extra hour for weeks.

He was dreaming of Misha again. It was so much better to be separated from her by daylight and not waking into darkness. He closed his eyes and reached back for her, but she was further away, further up the trail holding little Layla’s hand. Then they were fading. Then they were gone.

He got out of bed and stepped onto the conveyor of his weekday routine—shit, shower, shave, dress, and coffee, all without any conscious thought until the conveyor dumped him out in his office, at his desk, in front of his laptop. He logged in and opened his calendar to join the daily stand-up call with his team. But rather than see the Tetris bricks of his day all stacked up, sometimes three across in the Monday column, he saw nothing but whitespace. Weird. The calendar app had opened to Sunday, November 1, 2025, rather than Monday. He clicked the “Today” button, but the view didn’t change. Dismissing it as a bug, he paged over to Monday, clicked into the 8:30 meeting, and joined the call. He toggled over to pick up where he had left off work on a presentation Friday. After five minutes, he hadn’t heard a single chime to indicate anyone had joined the call. He toggled back to the meeting and was staring at his own frowning face and no one else. He must have dialed into the wrong bridge. He exited and tried again only to be greeted by the same empty room.

He looked down at his phone. The date displayed on his home screen was Sunday, November 1, 2025. Had he completely lost his mind? Yesterday was Sunday. He had done his grocery shop for the week. He had done the crossword, visited his brother’s family for Sunday dinner, and come home afterward to watch his favorite Sunday night show. Today was NOT fucking Sunday.

While he stared at his phone, as if on cue, a text appeared from Jake.

Still on for dinner tonight? Valerie is making lasagna.

All the blood drained from Frank’s face. He dropped the phone onto the desk and fell back in his chair. His stomach was still gurgling from last night’s lasagna. He closed the laptop, switched off the desk lamp, and left his office. If this was a trick, there were worse things than an extra Sunday. But unlike other Sundays, he would keep his eye on this one and make it count. He texted his brother and made an excuse about feeling under the weather. He skipped the grocery and the crossword too. Instead, he spent the day hiking, oxygenating his brain with the late autumn air. He did ten miles, and by the end was exhausted and pleased with himself. He grabbed dinner at a taco truck, then walked over to a nearby used bookstore with a coffeeshop. He spent the evening sipping green tea and reading a well-loved paperback copy of The Death of Ivan Ilyich.

Back home he took a hot shower before falling into bed. Lying there with the lights out, he entertained the idea he had been running from all day. Maybe I’m losing my mind. Maybe this is how it ends. But exhaustion spared him further existential angst. He fell asleep, and he dreamed of Misha and Layla again.

When the celestial arpeggio of the alarm on his phone sounded off in his darkened bedroom, it took some time for Frank to swim up from the depth of his dreams to silence it. Why the fuck was it dark? He squinted into the screen of his phone. Tuesday, November 23, 2025. No, no, no, no, no. This can’t be happening. He flung off the covers and walked to the window to look out, not sure what he was expecting to find. Chaos in the streets? An alien invasion? But it was just the maple tree—only this time with a few more leaves.

One time was a fluke. One day wasn’t a lot of time. Frank was certain people lost track of one day all the time. But twice? Twice suggested a pattern. Ten days was not something a person lost unless something was very wrong. He was beginning to feel that something was very wrong.

He didn’t remember last Tuesday. It was an unremarkable day like so many. He sat on the couch with his work laptop hoping for some hints about the day ahead—or rather the day that happened ten days ago. It was a wall of meetings with titles that made them nearly indistinguishable from one another. It was not a day worth repeating. On his phone, he scrolled back through his photo library and text messages and calendar looking for any clues as to what might have happened last Tuesday that would jar his memory. He knew before he even finished the search that there would be nothing, not even a text exchange with his brother.

He felt a crawling sensation in his gut and thought he might be sick. If he was, what would come up? Tacos from last night or whatever the fuck Lean Cuisine he had eaten the night of the 22nd? He didn’t want to find out. In the kitchen, he splashed some cold water on his face and felt a little better. Drying his face on a dish towel, he was suddenly consumed by a feeling, a reckless feeling, the kind that people with terminal cancer must have after they’ve overcome the initial shock of the diagnosis.

He returned to the couch and picked up his phone. An hour later, he was on the train bound for the airport. Two hours after that, he was in a first-class seat sipping a bourbon and Coke on the way to Austin because it was west but not so far.

In an Uber on the ride downtown, he asked the driver where he would eat lunch if it was his last day on earth.

“Home,” the man said. “With my family.”

“Just let me out anywhere then,” Frank said.

On Sixth Street, he walked into the first Tex-Mex place that was open. He ate at the bar and drank a margarita the size of a fishbowl and tried to avoid the gaze of the pasty man staring back at him from between bottles of Jameson and Maker’s.

After lunch, he wandered the length of the strip searching for any distraction. It was too early for any music except for a mariachi band playing outside another restaurant. The music was jaunty kitsch, but they played it with an angry stoicism he respected, so he bought a beer and watched. He was alone until a woman, mid-thirties with dark hair, sat two chairs down from him. She looked like a waitress who had just finished her shift.

Her name was Marina. She was newly divorced with two small kids. Her side-eye glances and eager laugh were trapped-animal energy. Escape was something he understood. They worked their way down the strip, eventually ending up in her favorite bar where she knew the house band. On the tiny, crowded floor in front of the stage, she pressed her lips into his neck and ground her pelvis against him. He wanted to feel something, and the music was loud enough to animate the illusion that he did. The shape of her reminded him of Misha, but she felt all wrong.

Marina picked a hotel that was close by, and he dropped $600 on a credit card like it was something he did every day. The door to the room had barely closed behind them before she pushed him onto the bed and started tugging off his jeans. He struggled to navigate her body. It had been a long time, and the alcohol blunted everything. It lasted perhaps too long or not long enough—he had no sense of time—but immediately after, he was weeping into her neck.

He didn’t remember falling asleep, but when the alarm went off at 7:00 a.m., he shot up into a sitting position. Outside the window of his bedroom, early morning sun was filtering through the leaves of the maple tree, still flushed green with chlorophyll. The smell of tequila and sex lingered, and his head throbbed. The date on his phone informed him that it was Friday, August 15, 2025. The phone slipped from his hand and clattered to the floor. He didn’t bother to retrieve it. He pulled the covers over his head and curled into a tight ball as if this might perform some kind of factory reset.

Two hours later he stirred, unaware that he had fallen back asleep. Someone was hammering on his front door. He rose and stumbled into the living room.

“Frank, open up! It’s me…”

He unbolted the door, opened it, and let it swing wide as he retreated to his bedroom. His brother called after him.

“What the fuck, man? Why aren’t you ready?”

When he saw Jake in his swimsuit and flip-flops, he remembered. The lake trip. The long ride in the back of the minivan with his nephews arguing the whole time. The pontoon boat that smelled sharply of mildew. His shoulders getting sunburnt. It wasn’t a day he wanted to relive, but he saw no other option.

“Sorry. I overslept. I’ll be out in five minutes.”

Before he left the house, he retrieved a shoebox of old comic books from the top of his closet for the boys and grabbed some sunscreen. The ride into the mountains was peaceful. He sat in the back row of seats and observed his brother’s family. His nephews devoured the comics. Valerie rubbed the back of his brother’s head. They talked easily about mundane things, and Jake commented on billboards the way their father used to on long trips. Frank replayed the night with Marina. The sex seemed almost as unlikely as the time jump. Was there another version of him in the shower with her now? He didn’t know how any of this worked.

There were beats throughout the day that he remembered as they happened, and he began to anticipate others. He kicked in some extra money to upgrade the boat to one that didn’t reek of mildew and didn’t have a broken ladder that would cut his younger nephew’s foot open. It struck him that he didn’t actually have to travel back in time to do these things. He could have done them the first time around. How much of his life had he been sleepwalking? His thoughts started to go to Misha and Layla, but he checked them, using the skill he had adapted out of necessity, at least in waking hours.

He never told Jake what was happening to him. There was no point. He was clearly losing his mind, and his big brother had seen enough, taken care of him enough, worried enough. This time on the lake, he just enjoyed making his brother laugh and relax for once. Frank drove them home through the long twilight with his brother dozing beside him. The van was quiet. The kids had fallen asleep, and his sister-in-law was on her phone. When he pulled into their driveway, Jake came to and insisted on driving him home, but Frank refused and ordered a ride from his phone. He carried the older nephew into the house for his brother. Back outside, they waited for his car, and Jake asked if he was okay.

“Yeah, yeah. I’m good.”

“Thanks for everything today. You were super uncle.”

“Nah, it was fun. The boys are growing up so fast.”

Frank glanced down at his phone and saw the car was one minute away.

“Hey,” he said, pulling his brother into a hug. “I love you, bro. Thanks for always holding me together.”

He turned and jogged out to meet the car before Jake could respond.

Back home in his bed, Frank read a few more pages of The Death of Ivan Ilyich, nodding off repeatedly until he set it down and switched off the light.

His dreams were vivid. Misha was angry, her face flushed in the way that used to scare him a little. But then they were laughing and walking hand-in-hand across an old train trestle. A train was coming; he could feel the vibration of it, and he pulled at her hand to run, but she wouldn’t run. She just kept smiling and laughing, and then suddenly, the urgency was gone. He was falling slowly through layers of plum, purple, and black, sinking into the comfort of oblivion. There was a softness and a sweet smell of mango and milk-breath. Dark, springy curls beneath his fingers. The pressure of a small, sweaty hand grasping his. Layla.

Frank was awake but didn’t want to open his eyes. The dream was so real, tactile. He was holding Layla’s hand. The frizz of her corkscrew curls tickled his nose. His heart hammered in his chest, and he swallowed hard, clenching his teeth to hold back a sob.

“Oww… Daddy, you’re hurting my hand.”

He startled and opened his eyes. It wasn’t possible. He was in Layla’s narrow bed, the one with the Moana comforter. The seashell nightlight glowed pink against the wall. Layla’s little body lay next to his, squirming to free her hand from his grip.

He couldn’t breathe. It was too much. This wasn’t real, couldn’t be. He was completely gone now.

“Can we get up? Can you make waffles? Please, please, please…”

He pulled her to him and buried his face in those curls, drinking her in, feeling the perfect geometry of her little body.

“Yes, yes, yes. I will make you waffles and pancakes with chocolate syrup…”

She broke free of him and ran out of the room, down the hallway. Frank moved slowly, taking it all in. If this was a dream, his mind had done a perfect reproduction. In the hallway he saw the door to their bedroom was open. He stood at the threshold. It was too much to hope that Misha would be there sleeping, her legs wrapped around a pillow, her hair splayed across the sheet. The bed was empty and unmade on his side. The bathroom door was open, and there was no light on. Misha was away in this needle-drop. He walked over to the bed and sat down. He could smell her perfume, and tears sprung to his eyes. He picked up the familiar/unfamiliar phone and stared at the homescreen. Saturday, November 19, 2022.

She was away on a work trip. She wouldn’t be home until tomorrow, and tomorrow he wouldn’t be here. In three months, they wouldn’t be here. There had to be a way to stop everything, to jam a wrench into the gears of whatever this cosmic machine was. But he knew deep down, there wasn’t.

He didn’t want to waste a second, so he went to find Layla. They made waffles, and he played every single pretend game she asked for. He let her watch a terrible show she loved just so he could cuddle her in his lap. He tried to think of ways he could get to Misha before tonight, but it was impossible. He could somehow travel through time, but there was no way, using actual modes of travel, to get to her. She was all the way across the country in the San Juan Islands on a corporate retreat. He remembered the trip from her photos. The place was beautiful and remote—off the grid by design. There was no cell service or Wi-Fi and only one ferry a day to the island. He wouldn’t see her. If he didn’t have the weight of Layla’s little body anchoring him on the couch, he would have exploded into a trillion pieces.

He did his best to be present with his little girl, but there was no letting go of the cosmic puzzle. He turned the pieces over a thousand times. In the few hours he had here, could he change the future? Could he stop the accident that would take their lives, or was there a cruel, immutable order to the chaos of the universe? He had to try.

While Layla ate her snack and colored, he recalled every detail about the accident: the time of day, the location, and most importantly, the truck driver who had fallen asleep at the wheel. On his phone, Frank tried every way possible to locate the man, but there were hundreds of Brian Wards. Frank vaguely remembered he lived somewhere like Reno. It was useless. This was a variable beyond his control. He focused on Misha. They hadn’t been in a good place. Long stretches of charged, silent contempt were punctuated by screaming fights after Layla was in bed. It was the morning after one of these fights that Misha had decided to drive Layla to visit her grandparents for the weekend.

Frank decided he would write a letter. But would it just disappear like he surely would before tomorrow morning? There had to be more he could do. He would leave nothing to chance. He called his mother-in-law and allowed them to FaceTime with Layla. After Layla ran off to play, he said he had a gift for them. He lied about winning an Alaskan cruise. He wanted to give it to them. The dates were non-negotiable, and the tickets non-refundable.

He read stories to Layla and let her sleep next to him in the big bed while he wrote a long letter to Misha. He wrote down all the things he had probably said to her before, but he wrote them now with the urgency of a man who was about to lose everything again. He told her she was right to want more from him. He told her he was sorry he had given so little and judged so much.

He printed a copy and left it in her makeup drawer. He also emailed it to her. Over the course of the evening, he drank three cups of coffee, determined to stay awake. Whatever this thing was that happened to him, he wouldn’t sleep through it this time. He paced through the house, still not believing he was there. He touched everything he knew Misha had touched just the day before when she was frantically packing for her trip.

He worked over the puzzle of his time travel, trying to discern a pattern. In the kitchen, on the whiteboard where they wrote down reminders for the week, he wrote down the dates for his jumps. He could find no pattern other than he was going backwards. The events of the days he was dropped into were of no great significance. It was seemingly random until he started doing the math.

1 day → 10 days → 100 days → 1,000 days.

He felt queasy. There was no way he was going to allow himself to go to sleep, but by 3:00 a.m., Frank was dissembling. There was a tremor in his hands as he lay down next to his daughter. He didn’t turn out the light. He held her and breathed in her scent, and his anxiety ratcheted down by degrees until he started to drift, to descend. He repeatedly caught himself and forced his eyes open. This went on for an eternity until the hard barrier between his thoughts and his dreams was nothing but a gauzy membrane that stretched thin and then disappeared entirely, and he was gone.

He knew where he was before he opened his eyes. The smell of dirty socks and the yeasty odor of stale beer. He opened his eyes to survey the bedroom of his college apartment. He had an erection so urgent and pronounced it was hard to think of anything else.

Frank lay there for a long time, staring at the ceiling above his bed. He looked at the back of his hands, the smooth, unblemished skin of a boy. He wasn’t filled with wonder or excitement. The erection deflated beneath the weight of his adult thoughts. Why was this happening to him? Was there a point to being needle-dropped through B-sides of his life? If there was, this day was his last chance. He understood the pattern now. It was exponential, spiraling out like a nautilus shell. The next jump would send him into oblivion—the primordial soup of all things that have been and have yet to be.

He got up too fast, filled with a sense of urgency he couldn’t act upon. His head was fuzzy—the consequence of borderline blood-alcohol poisoning or jumping 10,000 days into his past. He stepped into the shorts he had apparently stepped out of the night before. He knew where he was and roughly when, but there was no easy way to know with certainty. The smartphone was more than a decade into the future.

Misha, wherever she was, didn’t know he existed, wasn’t old enough to even have an interest in boys yet. He understood he had to let her go. Again.

He sensed he was alone in the grubby apartment. The doors were ajar to the bedrooms of the roommates he would never see again once they graduated.

He wasn’t just alone in this apartment.

On the refrigerator, there was a birthday card. It was from his mother. She had been gone so many years he had long stopped reaching for her when his heart was broken. But here, on this day, whatever it was, she was alive.

He had to dial information to get his parents’ number. When she answered on the third ring, out of breath, Frank couldn’t find words to respond.

“Hello? Is anyone there?”

“Mom?”

“Frankie, honey, everything okay?”

Her voice—he had forgotten how it sounded. It was lower than he remembered, and the way she called him Frankie, going up in pitch on the last syllable, brought tears to his eyes.

“Yeah, yeah, I think so. I just wanted to hear your voice.”

“Well, that’s so sweet. But I hope we’re going to see you today.”

“Why, what’s happening?”

“You promised you were going to come join us to celebrate the fourth. Remember?”

He had no memory of this. He hadn’t gone home for that holiday. Beyond a certain age, he had all but stopped going home for holidays, and even when he did, he never stayed very long. He had been so consumed with himself and his future, there was little time for anyone else.

And then there was the diagnosis, her rapid decline, and she was gone.

“Yes. I’ll be there,” he said. “What can I bring?”

It only took an hour to drive to the house he grew up in, but it felt much longer. For his 1978 Volkswagen Beetle it was 47 miles, but for Frank it was much further. He got lost once, not because he couldn’t remember, but because his mind was decades into the future, trying to catch up—no, trying to fall back.

The picture of the place that was fixed in his mind was all wrong. This home was somehow bigger—not close and small-windowed, but open and welcoming. Sunlight slanted through the massive sycamore tree and choreographed a dance of leafy shadows across the freshly cut lawn. His father was there, at the far end, emptying the mulch bag into a paper lawn bag. He looked up, raised a gloved hand, and smiled. His T-shirt was soaked with sweat.

“Can I help?” Frank called out, loud enough to be heard over the mower.

But his father waved him off and smiled that resigned, I-know-my-lane smile that had always given Frank permission to mostly ignore him. To his father’s surprise, Frank jogged over, took the mulch bag, and helped him finish the cleanup. He kept stealing glances at his father, taking his measure. They were men of about the same age now, only his father looked the worse for it, his spine already beginning to curve toward the stoop that would diminish him in old age.

“Everything alright at school?” he asked.

“Yeah. Things are great.”

He wanted to say more. Why was it so hard? They put the mower and the rest of the tools into the shed behind the house. As they crossed the backyard, returning to the house, Frank studied the old, sagging swing set he remembered his father assembling over a weekend when Frank couldn’t have been more than five. He walked over, swept some dust and cobwebs from one of the pair of swings, and sat down. His father turned to him, curious.

“Come sit with me, Dad,” Frank said.

His father walked over, his curious expression warming into a smile. He took a seat in the other swing, first testing his weight.

“You sure you’re alright?” he asked.

“I, umm… yeah, yeah, I’m good. I just… I was thinking about how long life seems sometimes, but it’s really not, is it?”

“No, I guess it’s not. None of us have a guarantee.”

“I know you’ve worked really hard, Dad. I know you worry about money. I don’t think you should, not so much. Me, Jake—we’re gonna be fine.”

His father’s only response was to turn slightly toward him, as if to be sure it was his son sitting on the swing next to him. Frank continued.

“All I’m saying is you and Mom—you should live a little.”

As if she heard her cue, his mom appeared in the frame of the back door to the kitchen. She was drying her hands on a dishtowel. He had forgotten the vibrance of her, the thick lustrousness of her hair, the wattage of her smile. His chest ached and his throat closed up. He couldn’t contain the swell of emotion. He got up from the swing and went to her.

She stepped out to give him a hug, and he took her in his arms fully, lifting her up off the ground so that her feet dangled.

He spun her around.

She laughed, a little embarrassed but then with genuine joy, a bubbling fountain he could feel cascading, thundering through him, and they were one body again, only this time he was carrying her.

Just as he had carried Layla and Misha…

and Jake and Valerie and his nephews…

and Marina and the mariachi band…

Time folded back on itself again and again into smaller and smaller dimensions. With each fold, a page of worries and regrets disappeared, a chapter filled with angst and self-important striving closed.

And even Frank began to thin, his edges softening, his tether to the known loosening and finally letting go.

And then he was drifting, floating down like the crimson leaves of the maple tree until all that remained was the warmth, the memory of light.

I wrote this story in a bit of a fevered dream, last minute scramble to make the deadline for The Midnight Vault II, a project I’ve admired from a distance for some time but have been unable to find the time to commit to. Spoiler, I missed the deadline. The irony of losing a day is not lost on me. Thankfully,

J. Curtis

was kind enough to hold the backdoor open for me so I could release it here with the rest of the wonderful pieces in this collection. Community writing projects like this are vital to getting new fiction writers a chance to be read. I’m proud to be a part of it. Thank you for being here.