In danger

Aaron dialed up the time machine to go back to the fall of Pompeii, but instead he landed in Charleston, summer 1989.

“This damned machine!” Aaron fumed to the ruddy fisherman nearby. “Always putting me in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

The fisherman’s skin looked like the moon – a pink moon, that is. He looked at Aaron like he’d just shit on the Bible. “You get yourself into trouble, messing with the Lord’s ways. Get yourself into that there church and beg the Lord forgiveness.”

Gag me on a spoon, Aaron thought – but didn’t say. This man in his overalls would just as soon poke him with a pitchfork as spit on him. Aaron looked around. Wind was picking up, trees were blowing, locals were hammering plywood on windows and doors. A hurricane was coming, sure as gun’s iron – so said the fisherman. But he didn’t say that exactly …
“Hurrickin’s a-comin’, shoah as gunzarn.”

Why was it always a coming, when it was a hurricane, as if it were the second coming of Jesus? These southerners knew a lot about Jesus, but did they think the hurricane presaged his second coming?

He’d better vamoose, and fast – before this redneck fisherman read his San Francisco bumper stickers on the back of the time machine. He wouldn’t like the coexist, marriage equality stuff at all – and he definitely wouldn’t like the “Jesus is coming … look busy!” one at all.