The Time-Slip Waitress

The clock above the pie case says 11:47. It has said 11:47 for a while now, but Samantha only figured that out a few hours ago. Hard to say which hour.

She wipes down the counter and watches the man in the booth by the window. Flannel shirt. Gray beard. He reads the same page of the same newspaper, then turns to the classifieds, then checks his watch, then flags her down. Every time.

"Refill?" she asks, already pouring.

"Thank you." He smiles up at her. "You know, you've got a good memory. That's exactly how I take it."

She glances at his cup. Half full. He asked for a refill forty seconds ago. She is sure of it, the way you're sure of a song you've heard too many times.

"Jeffery Barlow," he says, extending a hand across the booth. "I don't think we've met. I'm new in town."

Samantha stops pouring.

"No, you're not," she says.

He blinks. "Excuse me?"

"You said that last hour. Word for word. 'You've got a good memory, that's exactly how I take it.' Then you introduced yourself." She sets the pot down. "You did it the hour before that, too. I started counting."

Jeffery laughs, a short polite laugh, the kind you give a stranger who's joking. Then he checks his watch. Then he stops laughing.

"Eleven forty-seven," he says.

"Every night," she says.

He sits very still. His hand is still out from the handshake she never took. She takes it now, more to give him something to hold onto than anything else.

"Okay," he says slowly. "Okay. So here's a fun question. What's the date?"

"October ninth."

"Year, Samantha."

She has not told him her name. She is sure of that, too, and it lands on her with a strange weight.

"How do you know my name?"

"You have a tag," he says, pointing. Then he closes his eyes. "No. Wait. No tag. You took the tag off two shifts ago because it scratched your neck. You told the cook it was scratchy. You said..." His face works. "You said you got it at a gas station when the diner's order went missing. Twenty-two years ago."

The tag is, in fact, off. There is a red mark on her collarbone where it used to sit.

"Jeffery Barlow," she says again, but slower this time, tasting it. "Community college. Night class. Biology for nurses. You sat in the second row and you sharpened your pencil about nine hundred times per lecture."

His mouth opens. Nothing comes out for a second. Then: "Samantha Ingram."

"Took you long enough."

"You're..." He gestures at her, at the counter, at the whole diner, and does not finish the sentence. She knows what he means. She is sixty-three. The last time he saw her she was twenty-one, and so was he, and that was forty-two years ago, and neither of those numbers has moved.

"I look old," she says. "It's been four decades. It's been four decades for you too, somewhere. You just haven't been there for most of it."

"The loop," he says. "It's a loop. I've been saying it's a loop for..." He rubs his eyes with both hands. "I stopped counting the repeats around number thirty. There's a device in your basement."

"There's a what?"

"Under the floor. Behind the storage room. Big gray cabinet, military stencil on the side, the letters are worn off but it says something like FIELD TEMPORAL..." He waves a hand. "I found it the fourth repeat. I've been trying to shut it off every repeat since. It doesn't shut off."

Samantha pulls a stool out from behind the counter and sits down across from him. Her knees crack. She ignores that.

"Okay," she says. "Start from the fourth repeat. I've only figured out maybe three of them."

---

He talks for a while. She listens. It goes like this:

An experimental unit came through town in the sixties, some army survey crew, and they left a piece of equipment in the diner's basement when the diner was a different diner with a different name. The unit leaks. Every so often it wraps the building in an hour and pulls the hour tight, like a drawstring bag, and everything inside goes around and around.

Everyone in the loop resets. Diners finish their coffee and forget it. The jukebox plays the same song at the same minute. The same coffee spills.

Jeffery walked in at 11:03 one night, sat in the booth by the window, and has been walking in at 11:03 ever since. He remembers every hour. Nobody else does.

"Except you," he says. "You remember."

"No, I don't," Samantha says. "I notice. There's a difference. I don't know what happened at 11:20 last hour. I just know it happened before. It's like walking into your own house with the furniture rearranged. You don't know where anything is. You know it's wrong."

"That's more than anybody else has."

"Because I've worked here twenty-two years. This counter and me have an understanding." She taps the Formica. "Watch. In about five minutes, Marty Dobbs is gonna come in, order a slice of cherry, drop his coffee getting out of his coat, and swear at the ceiling."

Jeffery looks at his watch. "Five minutes."

"Five minutes."

They watch the door. At 11:52 exactly, the bell jingles, and Marty Dobbs shuffles in with his coat half on one arm.

"Cherry pie, Sam," Marty calls. "And coffee."

"Coming up."

Marty wrestles the coat off. His elbow catches the cup. Coffee goes everywhere. He swears at the ceiling.

Jeffery turns back to Samantha with his eyebrows up.

"And I clean it," she says. She's already out of the booth with the rag. "And then at 11:52 next hour, it happens again. Same elbow. Same swear. He always says the same swear. I've started saying it with him under my breath. Don't tell him."

She mops up the coffee. Marty apologizes like he always does. She tells him it's fine like she always does. She brings the cherry pie at 11:56 like she always does, because the pie warmer hums at 11:55 and she has learned not to fight the rhythm.

When she sits back down, Jeffery is staring at her like she's a magic trick.

"How long have you known?"

"About four hours' worth of hours. I thought I was losing my mind first. Then I thought it was a gas leak. Then a man in a flannel shirt ordered the same coffee twice and I thought, well, either I'm crazy or he is." She folds her arms. "Turns out neither. Handy."

"The song," Jeffery says. "Have you noticed the song?"

She has. Of course she has. The jukebox is on shuffle, mostly, but at 11:58 every hour, some customer or other punches a number and it is always the same number, and the same slow song comes on. A woman singing about a train. Samantha has heard it so many times she could sing the train's departure schedule.

"Fifty-eight minutes past," she says.

"Every hour," he says. "I've started to like it. That's the worst part. Stockholm syndrome with a jukebox."

Samantha laughs. It surprises her, coming out. She hasn't laughed much lately. Jordan left in the spring, after nineteen years, and since then it's been shifts and TV dinners and a quiet house.

"So what's the plan?" she asks. "You've had, what, thirty-some repeats to work on it."

"I unplug it. It doesn't stay unplugged. I break it. It doesn't stay broken. At the top of the hour, everything snaps back, including the equipment, including my crowbar." He spreads his hands. "The loop keeps its toys nice."

"So it can't be stopped."

"Something has to change. Something real. I keep thinking the loop is like a record with a scratch, and the needle jumps the groove back every time. You can't fix a record by yelling at it. Something has to lift the needle." He says it lightly, but his ears go a little red, and she notices that too.

Samantha looks at him. Flannel shirt. Gray beard. Second row, nine hundred pencils. She is sixty-three years old and single and standing in a diner that exists inside the same hour like a fly in amber, and the man who kissed her once in 1983 and never called is sitting in her booth, and something in her chest is doing a thing she hasn't felt in decades.

"You know what I remember about you?" she says. "There was a party. End of the semester. Somebody's apartment with a couch that swallowed people."

Jeffery goes very still.

"And you kissed me," she says. "Once. Right by the coats. And then you said you were sorry and left, and I thought about it for about a year, and then I got on with my life."

"I thought about it longer than that," he says quietly.

The jukebox clicks. 11:58. The woman starts singing about the train.

"Well," Samantha says. "Here's your repeat, Jeffery Barlow. What do you do with it?"

The song plays out. The woman sings about the train leaving without her. Samantha knows every word now, which is a thing she plans to never admit to anyone.

"Come on," she says. "You want to show me this machine, show me the machine."

Jeffery hesitates. "You sure? It's down in the basement. Basement of this place is a hundred years of spiders and grease traps."

"I've worked here twenty-two years. You think I don't know about the spiders?"

"Fair."

She unties her apron and hangs it on the hook by the register. There are maybe two customers left in the room, an old man dozing over a decaf, and nothing happening until Marty comes back at 11:52 of the next hour anyway. The night shift at the Rusty Spoon runs itself. That's why they gave it to her.

The basement door is behind the walk-in, down a staircase that smells like forty years of fryer grease. Samantha's knees crack on the second step. Jeffery clicks on the light, which is one bare bulb with a pull chain, because of course it is.

"It's back there," he says. "Behind the storage racks."

And there it is.

It's a big gray cabinet, tall as the ceiling almost, bolted to the concrete floor. Army stencil on the side. She can read it now that the light hits it right. FIELD TEMPORAL STABILIZER, and under that, PROJECT CHRONOS, and under that a serial number and a date that looks like 1963.

"Well," she says. "Huh."

"That's what I said. Thirty times."

The cabinet hums. Not loud. A low, steady hum, like a refrigerator in another room, the kind of sound you stop hearing until somebody points it out. There's a panel on the front with gauges and a row of switches, and dead center, a dial. Brass ring, numbered marks around it, a red needle pointing at one of them.

Samantha steps closer. The dial's marks go from ten to seventy. The needle sits on sixty.

"Minutes," Jeffery says. "I figured it out around repeat twelve. Sixty minutes. It's set to sixty. That's our hour."

"So if you turned it down to ten, we'd loop ten minutes."

"In theory. I never touched it. Whole cabinet scares me worse than the crowbar situation." He rubs his jaw. "Also it's got a placard. Look."

There's a small brass plate screwed to the front, under the dial. Samantha leans in and reads it out loud.

"DEVICE MAINTAINS TEMPORAL RESONANCE WITHIN STRUCTURE. DO NOT ADJUST WHILE RESONANCE IS ACTIVE. SURVEY CREW WILL RETURN."

"When's the survey crew coming, you figure? It's been sixty years."

"Maybe they got lost." Jeffery looks at the machine the way you look at a dog that's bitten somebody before. "This thing's older than both of us. Half of us. It's got vacuum tubes in the back, I checked. Actual vacuum tubes, glowing, like a radio from before television."

Samantha touches the cabinet. It's warm. Not hot, just warm, like something alive and asleep. The hum goes through her palm and up her arm.

"So an army survey crew comes through in 1963," she says, thinking out loud. "Diner was called something else then. The Blue Jay, I think. My manager has a photo. They eat, they leave, they forget this thing in the basement, and it just... runs. For sixty years. Wrapping the building in the same hour, over and over, and nobody notices because nobody's here long enough."

"You noticed."

"I notice things. It's the job. You watch the same twelve customers long enough, you notice when the coffee order's wrong before they say it." She turns to him. "So why does it bother you and not me? Why do you remember?"

Jeffery shrugs. "I don't know. I was inside the loop when it started, maybe. I came in at 11:03. Maybe the machine grabs whoever's mid-stride." He gestures vaguely. "I've had thirty repeats to think about it. All I've got is theories and a broken crowbar."

Samantha looks at the dial again. Sixty. Red needle, brass ring, numbers worn soft from nothing, because nobody has ever turned it.

"Jeffery."

"Yeah?"

"What happens if we change it? Just a little. Fifty-five minutes. Five minutes less of Marty dropping his coffee. Five minutes less of the train song."

"I don't know. That's the honest answer. Could do nothing. Could do something bad." He's looking at her, not the machine. "You want to try it."

"I want to try it. Don't you? Thirty-some hours of the same hour. I've memorized a Marty Dobbs swear word. That's not a life, that's a rerun."

He laughs. It's a good sound. She hasn't heard him laugh before tonight, or before tonight's thirty copies of tonight, which is a distinction she decides not to think about.

"Okay," he says. "But careful. Slow. We don't know what..."

He reaches past her to steady the dial housing, or maybe to point at the placard, she never finds out, because his elbow catches a shelf bracket, the shelf rocks, and his hand slaps the dial. Not a tap. A slap. The needle swings, the brass ring spins free under his palm, and somewhere inside the cabinet something goes clunk, then whine, then a rising note as a kettle starts.

"Oh no," Jeffery says.

"Jeffery Barlow."

"I didn't mean to. It slipped, it's loose, it's..."

The whine climbs. The gauges flicker. Samantha grabs his arm and drags him back from the cabinet, and just in time, because a spark jumps off the panel as a static shock with ambitions, and then the whole basement goes dark.

No. Not dark. Everything goes white at the edges, like a photograph overexposing, and Samantha feels her stomach drop the way it does when an elevator starts.

The stairs. The kitchen. The walk-in. The hum.

She's standing in the doorway of the basement with her apron still on the hook upstairs, except it isn't, because she's back at the counter, and the clock above the register