'Having Second Thoughts about Fractured Timelines' by Matt Gulley

With click into gauzy blue warp, I arrived outside an apartment in Rome, it was early November, 1820. John Keats was dying, so he was fragile — but at just five feet tall and a little under a hundred pounds, he made for a surprisingly convenient abductee. I carried him over my shoulder, sat him on my lap in the single-seater time machine, and once more journeyed through the long tunnel of immense gravity.

I had thought a lot about who I would bring back, ultimately I decided what the modern world needed was first-rate romantic poetry, more than anything else. I weighed the ethics of ripping one of history’s monsters out of their time, always afraid that a greater monster would fill their place. Changing history wasn’t the goal. I wasn’t looking to come back to the present and find a world on fire, with less than a billion people huddled in small tribes, smuggling the last of the unused nuclear warheads over disputed borders in some melodramatic all-annihilating chess game.

Upon arrival back in the day of my own affairs, in my home of America, I took him to a hospital. Tuberculosis, even an advanced case like his, was a far less formidable foe than two hundred years prior. The doctors took to him right away - they ignored most of his questions, delivered as they were through weak and phlegmy rattles.

As soon as he was on the mend I got him a few things, some pen and paper, a new laptop to see how he’d like it. Unfortunately there were no new Odes in him, and if there were, he didn’t have the time. His hospital bill was $130,592. He had to take two jobs just to keep his head above water.