Tales from the Universe
Moral Dilemma: If you could undo the worst mistakes of your life, would you still choose to erase them if doing so also erased the wisdom, relationships, and version of yourself that only exist because those mistakes happened?
Joren found the door behind a wardrobe.
This was irritating because he had owned the wardrobe for twelve years.
He was moving it to clean.
His wife had been asking him to clean behind it for approximately eleven of those years.
She was going to be unbearable about this.
Behind the wardrobe was a small wooden door.
Joren stared.
Their house had no room on the other side.
There was an exterior wall.
He opened it.
Beyond was his childhood kitchen.
Joren closed the door.
He stood very still.
Opened it again.
Childhood kitchen.
His mother was washing dishes.
She was thirty-two.
She had been dead nine years.
Joren forgot how to breathe.
“Mother?”
She turned.
“There you are.”
Joren began crying.
His mother frowned.
“What happened?”
He looked down.
His hands were small.
He ran to the polished pan hanging beside the stove.
A twelve-year-old boy stared back.
Joren screamed.
His mother screamed because he screamed.
Then both screamed for different reasons.
The day was the fifth of Harvest.
Joren remembered it.
Not because anything important happened.
Because his mother made plum cake.
He sat at the table.
Ate three pieces.
Listened to her complain about his father’s boots.
He knew every sentence before she said it.
He did not care.
When she touched his hair, Joren closed his eyes.
He had forgotten her hands.
That evening he went to bed.
He woke beside his wife.
Forty-three again.
Joren sat upright.
“Ela.”
His wife groaned.
“What?”
“I saw my mother.”
“Good.”
“No.”
She opened one eye.
“What?”
They moved the wardrobe.
The door remained.
Ela looked through.
She saw an empty room.
“What do you see?”
“Your mother’s kitchen?”
“No. Empty room.”
Joren opened it.
The kitchen appeared.
“So it’s yours,” Ela said.
“That doesn’t concern you?”
“Deeply.”
“Good.”
“I’m also concerned that this proves I was right about cleaning behind furniture.”
Joren stared at her.
“Please don’t make this about you.”
“I’ve waited eleven years.”
Joren experimented.
The door did not always lead to the same day.
He discovered a small brass dial beside the frame.
Turn it.
Open the door.
Another day.
Another year.
His past.
Any part of it.
At first he only visited.
His first kiss.
His daughter’s birth.
The afternoon he met Ela.
His father teaching him to fish.
His mother alive.
Again and again, his mother alive.
He became addicted to Tuesdays.
Ordinary ones.
Days nobody photographs.
Days where nothing happens.
Those were the ones he missed most.
Then he found the red mark.
One date on the dial had a tiny red line.
The seventeenth of Frost.
Twenty-three years earlier.
Joren knew immediately.
“No.”
He closed the panel.
Walked away.
Returned an hour later.
Opened it.
Snow.
A tavern.
Joren was twenty.
His friend Kellen sat across from him.
Young.
Annoying.
Alive.
Joren’s stomach turned.
They had been drinking.
Too much.
Kellen wanted to walk home.
Joren said they should take the river road.
Kellen said the forest path was shorter.
They argued.
Joren called him a coward.
Kellen took the forest path alone.
He never arrived home.
They found his body two days later beneath a ridge.
He had slipped.
Broken his neck.
Joren had carried that argument for twenty-three years.
Now he was there again.
Kellen stood.
“Forest.”
Joren grabbed his arm.
“No.”
Kellen laughed.
“Afraid?”
“Yes.”
The answer surprised both of them.
Joren pulled him back into the chair.
“We stay here.”
“Why?”
“Because I love you.”
Kellen stared.
“You are extremely drunk.”
“Yes.”
“So are you.”
“Yes.”
They laughed.
They slept under the tavern table.
Kellen lived.
Joren woke beside Ela.
He screamed with joy.
“Kellen!”
Ela sat up.
“Who?”
Joren stopped.
“What?”
“Who is Kellen?”
“My friend.”
Ela frowned.
“You’ve never mentioned him.”
Joren ran downstairs.
There was a letter on the table.
From Kellen.
Alive.
Living three towns away.
Joren cried.
Again.
He visited.
Kellen had a wife.
Two children.
A bad knee.
A successful brewery.
They hugged.
Kellen seemed confused by the intensity.
Joren did not care.
He had fixed it.
The door could fix things.
He began making a list.
Mistakes.
Regrets.
Deaths.
Arguments.
Failures.
Some small.
Some enormous.
He returned to the day he insulted his brother.
Didn’t.
Their relationship improved.
He returned to a business decision that cost his family years of savings.
Changed it.
They became wealthier.
He returned to the night his daughter broke her arm because he had forgotten to latch the garden gate.
Latched it.
No broken arm.
Every correction improved something.
Joren became obsessed.
Ela became different.
Gradually.
At first he couldn’t identify it.
She laughed less at certain jokes.
Used different expressions.
Stopped making a particular stew.
Then one morning she called him “Jor.”
She had always hated that nickname.
“What did you call me?”
“Jor.”
“Why?”
“Because that’s what I call you.”
“No.”
Ela stared.
“Yes.”
His daughter changed too.
She no longer painted.
Joren noticed because her paintings disappeared from the hallway.
“Where are these?”
“What?”
“Your paintings.”
She laughed.
“I can’t paint.”
“Yes, you can.”
“No.”
“You used to.”
“When?”
Joren had no answer she could understand.
He searched the dates.
The broken arm.
During recovery, his daughter had been unable to play outside for two months.
Ela bought her paints.
She became obsessed.
Painting became her profession.
Joren had prevented the broken arm.
The paintings vanished with it.
He went back.
Left the gate open.
Then waited.
His daughter ran outside.
Joren knew what came next.
He could stop it.
He did not.
She fell.
The scream tore through him.
He ran.
Held her.
Her arm bent wrong.
She cried against his chest.
Joren hated himself.
He woke.
The paintings were back.
Ela called him Joren.
He stood in the hallway staring at a landscape his daughter had painted at sixteen.
Ela found him.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“You’re crying.”
“I know.”
He told her everything.
This took hours.
When he finished, Ela sat quietly.
“So you let her break her arm.”
Joren flinched.
“Yes.”
“To restore her paintings.”
“Yes.”
Ela looked toward the hallway.
“Did she choose that?”
“No.”
“Then you made the same mistake twice.”
Joren stared.
“What?”
“The first time you accidentally left the gate open.”
She pointed toward the hidden door.
“The second time you deliberately decided what suffering she should have because you preferred the person it produced.”
Joren felt sick.
“But she’s happier.”
“Are you sure?”
“She loves painting.”
“In this life.”
“Yes.”
“What did she love in the other one?”
Joren stopped.
He didn’t know.
He had been too busy noticing what was missing.
The door remained closed for months.
Then Joren’s mother appeared in his dreams.
Not magically.
Just dreams.
He began thinking about the cancer.
He knew the date she first became ill.
Perhaps—
Ela found him standing beside the wardrobe.
“No.”
“I could warn her.”
“Maybe.”
“She could get treatment earlier.”
“Maybe.”
“She might live.”
“Yes.”
Joren touched the brass dial.
“How can I not try?”
Ela did not answer.
That was worse than being stopped.
He went back.
His mother was fifty-eight.
She was making tea.
Joren told her.
Everything.
The illness.
The diagnosis.
The years ahead.
She listened.
Then asked:
“How many times have you done this?”
“Done what?”
“Changed things.”
Joren looked away.
His mother had always been annoyingly difficult to lie to.
“Many.”
“Are they better?”
“Some.”
“Are you?”
He began crying.
“I can save you.”
“Maybe.”
“You died.”
“I gathered.”
“I can stop it.”
His mother touched his face.
Joren leaned into her hand.
“I miss you.”
“I know.”
“Come with me.”
“I can’t.”
“Then let me fix it.”
She was quiet.
Finally:
“What happened after I died?”
Joren stared.
“What?”
“To you.”
“I grieved.”
“And?”
“I don’t know.”
“Try.”
So he told her.
He and his brother had stopped fighting during her illness.
Ela had moved her workshop home to help care for her.
During those months, Ela and his mother became close.
After the funeral, Joren’s father moved in with them.
His daughter painted a portrait of her grandmother from memory.
Joren started visiting Kellen more often because death no longer felt theoretical.
He changed careers.
He stopped postponing things.
None of these were reasons his mother should have died.
Joren said that immediately.
His mother nodded.
“Of course not.”
“Then I should warn you.”
“Perhaps.”
“You’re not helping.”
“I am your mother. It is traditional.”
She poured tea.
“Your mistake is thinking the choice is between a bad past and a good past.”
“What is it?”
“A known life and an unknown one.”
Joren looked at her.
“If you save me, perhaps everything improves.”
“Yes.”
“Perhaps it doesn’t.”
“Yes.”
“You don’t know.”
“No.”
His mother smiled.
“Neither do you.”
Joren returned without warning her.
He hated himself for that too.
There was no clean choice.
Apparently that was becoming a theme.
Years passed.
He stopped using the door.
Mostly.
Once, after a terrible argument with Ela, he stood in front of it for an hour.
He knew exactly which sentence he could remove.
He didn’t.
The next morning he apologized instead.
It was considerably less efficient.
When Joren was sixty, the house needed renovation.
A carpenter found the door.
“What is this?”
“Nothing.”
“It’s a door.”
“Yes.”
“Where does it go?”
“Somewhere expensive.”
The carpenter frowned.
“Should I remove it?”
Joren looked at the wardrobe.
At the brass dial.
At every life he might still rearrange.
“Yes.”
They removed the frame.
Behind it was brick.
The carpenter shrugged.
“Strange.”
Joren kept the brass dial.
Not because it worked anymore.
Because it didn’t.
Many years later, his granddaughter found it in a drawer.
“What does this do?”
Joren smiled.
“Used to open a door.”
“To where?”
“The past.”
She rolled her eyes.
“Grandfather.”
“Fine. It was part of an old clock.”
She examined it.
“If you could go backward, what would you change?”
Joren laughed.
“Absolutely nothing.”
She looked impressed.
Then Joren added:
“That is a lie.”
She laughed.
He turned the little dial between his fingers.
“There are hundreds of things I would change.”
“Then why say nothing?”
“Because wanting to change something and having the right to rewrite everyone affected by it are different questions.”
His granddaughter frowned.
“That sounds complicated.”
“It became complicated.”
She handed the dial back.
Joren looked at the old brass marks.
Somewhere inside him remained the young man who wanted another road for Kellen.
The father who wanted to latch the gate.
The son who wanted his mother alive.
He did not become wise enough to stop wanting those things.
He simply stopped believing pain was proof that history had been written incorrectly.
Some things should have gone differently.
Some mistakes should never have happened.
Some losses were simply losses.
And yet here he was.
Not the best possible Joren.
Not the worst.
The one who had arrived.
His granddaughter called from the other room.
“Are you coming?”
Joren put the dial away.
“Yes.”
And went forward.
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