Flying in the Heart of the Lafayette Escadrille by James van Pelt

said, and they walked toward her house.
    In her bedroom, Meadoe held the hand still under her belly, and she walked hand in hand with Nathaniel down Harriston Boulevard. They went in her front door. A brief kiss. A fumbling with buttons and snaps. They laughed in the afternoon’s warmth, nearly stifling in the house, oblivious of heat and atomic bombs and milk trucks.
    Meadoe forced her eyes open to the bedroom’s darkness. Their laughter rang in her house, echoey and distant. Moonlight slanted through the window, gathered in a form lying beside her.
    His eyes were open, staring into her own across the years. Young eyes, long dead. They blinked.
    “I’m not who you think I am,” said Meadoe.
    The voice barely made it to her ears. It could have been no more than a breeze outside. Her own heart thudding in her veins. As light as a lover’s touch. “I know, Tokyo Rose,” he said, then the room was empty and twenty degrees cooler.

    August 8, Saturday: Final Reel

    “So you haven’t seen evidence of the ‘ghost’ since Wednesday night?” Joan pulled her notepad from a briefcase. She was in her therapist’s mode now, harder, more brusque than Joan the friend.
    “No. He’s gone.” Meadoe leaned back in her chair.
    “How can that be? You didn’t change history. He still died on August 6, 1945. You told me Erica Weiss believed it was her fault, that she still believes it, so why would he disappear?”
    Meadoe smiled. “I don’t know, really, but I don’t think I changed history. I changed the ghost. It’s quantum physics, like I told you before—the uncertainty principle. Individual electrons are in all possible positions. History plays itself out in all ways.”
    “Parallel worlds?” Joan wrote on the pad, and Meadoe couldn’t tell if she was taking her seriously or not, but she didn’t care. Couldn’t Joan feel it in the house? How much sweeter the air was? How much easier it was to breathe?
    “Maybe, but I don’t think it’s that simple. Parallel spirits maybe. The worlds aren’t discreet. Nathaniel intersected here. I just showed him another way it could have turned out.”
    Joan tapped her pen against the page. “You sound different. What’s going on?”
    “Remember last week when you asked me what I feared most?”
    Joan nodded.
    “I found out what it was, and I conquered it.”
    “In the dream?
    “In the dream.” She remembered holding Nathaniel’s hand back. She’d said, “wait,” and he’d stopped. The power was in her then; it was in her now. She had control. “Come on, I want to show you something in the bedroom.”
    “What?”
    “You’ll see.”
    In the bedroom, Joan looked around. “Did you clean the windows? It seems brighter in here.”
    Meadoe shook her head. She hadn’t noticed it before, but Joan was right. The room was brighter. She sat on the edge of the bed, waiting. Joan paced the room.
    “Look at the collage,” said Meadoe.
    Joan contemplated the wall and found it almost immediately. “Where’s Tokyo Rose? And who is that? How did you get that picture under the varnish?”
    Meadoe smiled. She’d seen it Thursday morning when she awoke, happy, nearly ready to sing, and she’d lain in the bed in languid glory. Her eyes followed the Life covers to the drawing, only it wasn’t Tokyo Rose anymore. Smiling from the penciled portrait, as stunning as any of the movie stars, a black-haired girl, curls waving around her ears. Erica Weiss. In Nathaniel’s hand, a date, August 7, 1945.
    Joan said, “He was already dead.”
    Meadoe bounced against the bed’s edge. “Just in this world, Joan. Just one of him.”

Teaching

    When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
    When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
    When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide,
    and measure them,
    When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with
    much applause in his lecture room,
    How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
    Till rising and