A Brief Errand in Time

cotton

PHOTO PROMPT © Rochelle Wisoff-Fields

If you like my work, buy me a virtual cup of coffee at Ko-Fi.

Miles Jackson strolled past the bistro to The Cotton Exchange. His contact said he had to depart from someplace that existed both now and at the target date. He wouldn’t have much time once he arrived, which was ironic. But in 2024, he couldn’t walk down the streets of Wilmington dressed like a Civil War era slave.

The vaccine was secure in his pocket. Miles knew that ten-year-old Caleb would be in a house just two doors down on the morning of August 16, 1862. He had to inoculate him for the Yellow Fever so his ancestor would grow up.

It’s Wednesday and once again time to participate in Rochelle Wisoff-Fields’ 19 April 2024 edition of Friday Fictioneers.

The idea is to use the image above as the prompt for crafting a poem or short story no more than 100 words long. My word count is exactly 100.

Upon finding out the name of the photo’s location was The Cotton Exchange and that it’s kind of a famous place in Wilmington, North Carolina, I started looking at the wider history.

cotton2

The Cotton Exchange, screen capture of Google Maps.

The building was constructed years before the Civil War, which gave me my hook. The history says that in 1862, there was an outbreak of Yellow Fever. Also, most of the battles happened away from Wilmington so a lot of the Antebellum era locations remain intact today.

What if a person had to prevent an ancestor from contracting a potentially deadly disease so that they could live and have children? That’s the premise of my wee tale.

Oh, the bistro I mentioned is “The Basics” which is just to the right of The Cotton Exchange in the screenshot above.

To read other stories based on the prompt, visit inlinkz.

tom corbett

Promotional image by “Starry Eyed Press.”

I added to my announcement of the publication of the start of my 16 chapter story based on the old “Tom Corbett, Space Cadet” TV show.

Each new episode drops on Saturday and the first two of them are already available. Having tested the link both on my PC and my Kindle Fire tablet, I can get to and read each chapter FOR FREE! So can you.

Please support your friendly neighborhood indie SciFi author by reading the chapters, press the “like” or “thumbs up” button (if you like what you read) for each individual “episode” and don’t forget to leave a comment for each chapter.

Visit Our Legacy, The Stars: A Tom Corbett Adventure and start having fun.

51 thoughts on “A Brief Errand in Time”

  2. LOL. I can think of a lot of problems besides the metric system though that, indeed, would be an issue in the US! Who knows?! We may have a monarchy ourselves before long. I liked your story! You have this time travel/scifi thing down!

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  3. What an interesting take on the prompt! And yes, in 1962 Abe hadn’t free the slaves in the secessionist states yet, so it would have been a matter of not just the target, but perhaps of many others around him to be free of the illness. Interesting thougts.

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    • That would be a lot more complicated, and even if you could stop Columbus, say by taking a modern Navy submarine with you and sinking his ships, other Europeans would eventually come over and the same thing would happen. I did once write a series on this blog where very distant history had been changed so ancient sea dinosaurs didn’t go extinct. Made it impossible for the old sailing ships to travel across the Atlantic, isolating the “Americas” from Europe. I found a video on YouTube that described how the indigenous people here might have developed without European colonization. Keep in mind, some of the various tribes did war against each other, take each other’s lands, and make each other slaves, so it wasn’t a perfect situation.

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  11. There’s a nice circularity in this. I’m guessing Caleb did survive, because Miles is alive, and succeeded in going back with the vaccine, and so on … Mind-boggling stuff! I love time travel stories. Good one.

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  16. I love time travel stories, and this is an interesting concept! Mine is time travelly as well, a follow on from a previous prompt. Worm holes…anything to do with time travel is so much fun! well done 🙂

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  18. I always love a time travel story and you did not disappoint. Only question is if his ancestor died of yellow fever how does MC exist? Did he die after having children? Is there a time loop like in The Terminator? So many possibilities.

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