Grandpa's Pocket Watch

I stared at the school assignment I had just completed. It hit close to home, but regardless of how hard I tried, my teacher wouldn’t give me a pass on it. I had to describe in great detail one moment that changed my life forever. The problem is I only ever had one thing in my life that truly changed me, like, as a person. That would be the death of my sister.

Last year on November 1st, it was a rainy day. My sister, Megan, was inside watching tv. It was some stupid show, or I found it stupid at the time, but what I would give to come home from school and hear the goofy theme music playing in the background. She was only six years old at this time, I was thirteen. My mom was at the grocery store and my dad was away at a press conference, so I was left in charge to watch her. It was around three or so in the afternoon, so I made us some snacks and went about my day like normal. 

Around 3:45, I felt extremely nauseated and so I ran to the bathroom. The only thing I remember is seeing a white milky substance in my vomit. From there, everything else was blurry; I tried my best to fight my double blurred vision and made it to the couch. That was where I blacked out and the last thing I heard my sister say to me is “Are you ok?”

When I woke up, my mom was hysterically sobbing with several police officers and my dad on speakerphone. My mom had spent the last three hours trying to wake me up and find out where my sister went. She became concerned when I didn’t wake up and called the police when none of our neighbors had seen where Megan had gone.

My mom, struggling to cope with her emotions, attempted to blame me for the situation, stating if I hadn’t fallen asleep, she’d still be here. Fortunately, at the suggestion of the EMTs on site, who found it odd that I would just fall asleep like that without waking up, I had some bloodwork done and it had revealed that something or someone had drugged me. There was a large amount of sleeping pills in my system, and from there, it was theorized that something in the snacks I had made earlier was poisoned. 

The only thing we could really do from there was throw away all of our food to make sure it wouldn’t poison the rest of us. From there, we had assembled a search party because if Megan had eaten the same thing I had, then she may have left the house and blacked out somewhere.

My mom and dad struggled with their marriage from there and I still feel they blame me, my social life declined and we mostly kept to ourselves for the next month. We had covered a ten mile radius and found no sign of Megan. However, one morning, a YouTuber who made a living off of drone videos found a car in the river in the next town over.

That day, on December 1st, they had pulled the car from the near frozen river and informed my parents that my sister’s deceased body was found in the trunk. We had gotten our closure, but no evidence could be found linking her murder to anyone in specific. I heard through my bedroom door the cop tell my mom about the torture Megan had endured.

They had found signs of strangulation, which they believed was involved with sexual assault. The coroner had found multiple fractures on her ribs, head, arms and legs, with several major fractures on her ankles and feet, most likely caused to prevent escaping. They found very little food in her system and it was believed that she didn’t die from her injuries or conditions, but from the fact that she was so starved and dehydrated that by the time he was done with her, he had just tossed her in the trunk and ditched it in the river. She died from drowning and hypothermia just six hours before her discovery.

It has finally been a year and the case has gone cold. No new evidence had been found, I’m practically alone, my parents don’t talk to each other. It’s like the world I’m living in is a mirror reflection of the one in which we lived just a year ago. I had decided I needed a fresh start, so did my parents, so I walked into my sister’s bedroom with a large box. Most of her clothes, aside from a few sentimental items for my parents, had either been sold or donated, so it was mostly personal belongings.

I started pouring things in, notebooks, jewelry, makeup, keepsakes, whatever I could find, into the box. I didn’t want to look at any of it. I felt no need to relive anything. Once the box was full, I took it up to the attic. I found a comfortable spot in the corner that got a few hours of sunlight a day and set it there. Mom would be upset knowing I had moved her stuff, let alone not taken care of any of it. 

On my way out, the shine of a gold chain sticking out of an old wooden jewelry box had caught my eye. I walked over to the box and opened it and inside was a silver pocket watch with a gold chain. I immediately recognized it as my grandfather’s. I didn’t have many memories with him, especially after the move, but my mom said regardless of the distance, he was always there watching over me.

I opened the pocket watch up and inside was a note with my name on it. Curious and shocked, I opened the note. 

“Press me,” it read.

I pressed the button and the world warped around me. The shift was massive and had given me a headache, but when everything had cleared up, the boxes were more organized and the attic, as a whole, had been maintained much better than it had been over previous the previous year he had experienced. I crept towards the stairs when I heard the front door open and Megan’s voice light up my ears. It was odd, though. For just a minute, it sounded distorted, like she was trying to speak with water filling her throat. I got scared hearing her voice like that and gripped the watch in my hand.

After another sudden shift, which put me on my ass this time around, I got back up and everything was the way I knew it to be. Not even paying attention to the shift, I ran downstairs to see if Megan was there, only to see a very depressed Mom and Dad in the kitchen, trying to find something to cook. I looked down at the watch and immediately thought that if I pressed the button, it or something would take me back to Megan.

I ran back up to my room and locked the door. As I sat on the bed, I looked at the watch. It was an ordinary analogue watch, but it had a display that showed you a date and a time. The date and time was set to November 1st of last year and the time was set to 2:14 PM. I contemplated before deciding that I should at least see what the watch had done that caused me to hear Megan. I pressed firmly on the button and, just like before, the room shifted. 

I came to find the watch would bring me back in time. I confirmed this with the calendar hanging on my wall, which was the one from last year. As soon as I approached the door, Megan’s voice came through the door again, sounding completely normal.

“Mommy, I’m here!”

“Ok, think, if you want to do this, we have to do it right, so think!” I yelled in my head, “Remember what you did that day, we can save her!”

I remembered that I was late coming home that day, I didn’t get home until closer to three, which would be good for me.

“Me, too!” I heard myself call back.

My heart sank, since I didn’t know why I didn’t stay at school. I ran and hid behind the door, ready to do anything if he came in. Then, I realized, if I’m home early, maybe none of this will happen. I pressed the button again and the room shifted. I grabbed my phone to see if I could find her obituary and, to my dismay, there it was. It was also different because I know she went missing not long before Mom came home, but her obituary says it was closer to the time Mom left for the store.

I started to feel frustrated and pressed the button on the watch. I ran over to my window to see me and Megan walking towards the door, laughing and joking with each other.

I hear the door open and the same greeting from last time. I creep out the door and through the hall, trying to keep myself hidden. For some odd reason, nothing is happening. It’s like the world is frozen and everyone is just doing weird things until Mom has to go to the store. When that time came around, the scene played how I remembered it. THE PEANUT BUTTER!!!! I made us PB&J sandwiches for snacks and that’s when everything went wrong. The poison had to be in the peanut butter or jelly.

I press the button to get more peanut butter and jelly from our house. After switching the ingredients out, I found a little place I can hide and watch everything play out. I still pass out and she still leaves the house. I see things from a different perspective though. 

“I’m gonna go get mommy for you,” she said in a soft scared voice.

My heart broke. I walked down the stairs to watch her leave, but when I got to the entrance, she was gone. It’s like she vanished without a trace. I noticed that I had been fidgeting with the dial on the watch and as I did that, the date and time changed on the watch. I started to put things together on how the watch worked and I couldn’t have any issues with my past self, so I set it for early that morning and pressed the button. 

I opened up my school computer and submitted a bunch of assignments that were half completed or ones that I edited with a bunch of slurs on it. That seemed to work, since later that day, when I traveled back to my hole, only Megan came home. I kept note of the time and set the dial to this specific moment when she walks through the door. From there, I just waited to see how long it would take for me to get home.

After a few hours, I started to get tired. I felt my eyelids getting heavier and heavier. After I let them fall closed for a few seconds, I heard screaming and gunfire. Six rounds were fired, followed by fleeting footsteps. I didn’t want to go down there, so I just clicked the button and went back home.

I looked at my phone without even moving from my spot and saw that someone broke in, most likely a burglar, and ended up shooting my mom and my sister. No one saw who entered or left, no one found anything, now my mom and my sister are gone. I tried everything I could, I took my past self’s place after he didn’t come home for hours, I kept Megan under my watchful eye, but no matter how many times I went back and forth between my time and this tangled mess that’s the day my sister died, it would always result in my mom and/or sister’s deaths. 

Sometimes I would hear news of an earthquake or an engine failure and find out my dad would die as well. I turned the dial and went to the moment in time just before Megan walked out the door. I watched her leave, but just as I ran to get her, I was stopped by an elderly man. I turned towards him in fight or flight instinct to attack, but I saw the man was my grandpa.

“Hey, Slugger, I’m sure you want to do that, but you can’t and you won’t like why,” he said in a calming tone.

I looked at him blankly, not sure how to react to what he was saying or the fact that he was just standing here like he wasn’t dead.

“Just follow me,” he said, taking the watch and setting it to a certain date and time: August 26th, 1948. “I’ll explain everything to you.”

He pulled out a watch and clicked the button just as I did. We ended up in a small garage, so small that my entrance knocked over my great grandma’s old clay pot, the one we still have in our garage, and broke it down the middle.

“Ah, don’t worry about it. I mean, we can always go back and fix it, don’t you think?” He asked.

I didn’t know if he was testing me or not, so, me thinking that this kind of power is worth saving a piece of clay, so I replied with “no.”

“Good. That means you’re catching on,” he said, picking up the two pieces of the pot. “I didn’t come there by chance, I was waiting for you. Every time, you’d hide or be in disguise and I just never got close enough to tell you that this isn’t going to end the way you think.”

“But she’s my sister. You never even got to know her. I did.”

“You think I didn’t know my own granddaughter? She loved pink and barbies and she loved to watch true crime with her mom, but deep down she was always a daddy’s girl.”

“How do you know all of this?” I asked him.

“When you found my watch, you had a reason to go back. I didn’t have any reason, so I chose to move forward and get some spoilers for what was to come. I went there, somehow drawn there, I think, now, because of you, to that very moment in time. I already watched her die over and over and over again. I watched a masked man take her and put her in his car and believe me, son, I tried everything. I tried to get to her before he could, I tried to follow them, even when I thought I had saved her, she died from a brain aneurysm. I realized what I was doing wasn’t fixing anything because every time I went back, it was never really the same. Not only that, but every time I went back into that house for her, things were different because time was fighting back.”

While he told me this story of spending years trying to save my sister and how he failed, he was fixing the pot. His story shifted from how the rescue attempts would cause his own members of his family to die and not be returned after he fixed his mistakes, he realized that the universe wanted Megan dead.

“Just like this clay pot here. It was broken, just like what you’re doing to history every time you go back. You can do whatever you want to try and fix what you think is broken,” he said, and as he spoke, he applied an adhesive to the edges of the clay pot, “you can try whatever you want to restore it, but no matter what, you’ve taken from it’s original beauty by committing these acts anyway, and I know this because I’ve committed these acts as well. The best thing you can do for Megan and your parents is to let her go and grieve with them.”

“I can’t just let her go,” I replied, crying.

“You aren’t letting her go, you’re letting the pain go. It killed me when I lost her, and it killed me even more when I realized I couldn’t save her with this power we’ve been given, but what we can do is move forward.”

He held up the pot and showed me the sealed crack along the center of the pot and I understood what he was telling me. I just leaned in and gave him a hug. We talked a bit and I will say, it definitely made me feel better. After that, we both went our separate ways. I might see him again in the future because I don’t know how far into the future he went. I don’t even know when he came from, but he was waiting there for me. If Megan is out there somewhere with this watch, I’ll be waiting for her, too.

For now, I decided that this kind of power isn’t meant for me, not yet anyway. I checked my phone to see my sister’s obituary, nothing had changed there. I walked around the house to see if anything was different and nothing seemed out of the ordinary, so I decided against testing my luck in that arena.

I slowly walked up to the attic, as if I was prolonging this moment, and placed the small box, in which the watch was before I found it, and put it down on the table. I wrote a note inside and addressed it to Megan. I put the watch in the box and closed it. As I walked down to the hallway, passing the stairs to the front door, I looked down and felt like I could still hear her voice saying in her singsong-y voice:

“Mom, I’m home!”