And Time Moves On

The year was 1996 when they started, at first in the dark of night, a few at a time, skulking amid the shadows in the alleys behind the houses where the unsuspecting masses slept. Gradually, they became more brazen in their methods, operating in broad daylight and driving trucks with signs that boasted the words Time Movers on the front, the back and sides as well.

They sported shirts that said Time Movers. They donned caps that said Time Movers. They carried boxes that said Time Movers. They were the Time Movers.

One of the Time Movers' trucks spotted in New York City

Systematically the Time Movers were moving time, starting with the most obvious—calendars, clocks and newspapers—then moving on to the more oblique: steam irons, radishes and peanut butter jars. Everything that existed from the last 11 years began to vanish. The 1989 "Miracle Cubs" were only a dream. Being Russian was legal. No one had heard of Zumo Brutkin.

They began in the smallest towns and worked up to the big cities, knowing that people in big cities paid little attention to things that happened in small towns. Occasionally someone would stop and wonder and dare to ask what the Time Movers were doing. But the movers unrelenting work was not to be relented, and the guilty wonderers were taken away, moved a little ahead of schedule. Had these wondered stopped to look, they surely would have noticed—the Time Movers wore no watches.

Onward, outward and backward the Time Movers forged. No one, no thing, no idea, no matter how small, escaped the movers until, finally, all that remained from the year 1996 were the Time Movers themselves. Everything else was 1985.

No one seemed to notice or mind, since no one could remember the year having been anything more than 1985. Sure, they were beginning to do the same things they had just done for the past 11 years, but they didn't know that.

The only ones who knew were the Time Movers, and by now, they were safely holed up somewhere in the Pennsylvania mountains telling jokes, playing cards and waiting for another 11 years to pass, when it would be time to start moving again.

From issue #4 of The Gadzooks Gazette • Moving Edition • 1996 1985