“So, are we not going to talk about it?” Louise asked, turning and walking backwards so she could look the woman who was following her in the face.

“Nah.” Fellis rubbed one of her long, pointed ears, playing with some of the many rings and studs that adorned them.

The two walked in silence, both pointedly ignoring the onlookers who were blatantly staring. A moment passed before Louise decided to press the issue. “Do you mind if I ask why?”

“‘Cause it’s fuckin’ stupid.”

Sensing Fellis’ agitation, Louise held back her comments, but mused to herself that much of what she’d witnessed the past twelve hours was starting to make sense.

“Look, I’m no physicist, but I do know that small-scale time travel is impossible. Like, it’s been mathematically proven. Impossible. Not just like, ‘we haven’t figured it out yet’, but rather ‘we have figured it out, and it can’t be done.’ If I really had like, accidentally traveled to the past, it’d completely rewrite our understanding of how the universe works on a fundamental level.”

“Small-scale?” Louise repeated.

“In this case, large-scale would be like, fuckin’… more resources than the entire human race had at its highest point.” For a moment, it appeared Fellis was about to continue speaking, but she evidently decided against it, and fell back into silence.

Soon, the two stepped into the tailor’s shop. There, the woman behind the counter perked up and began to greet Louise, before freezing a moment later as she noticed her cervine companion, ducking low through the doorway to get her antlers in.

“Maggie, this is Fellis. She’s… a friend.” Maggie and Fellis each darted their eyes to the other and back to Louise as she spoke, both wearing similar expressions of apprehension. Louise continued, “I’d like to buy her some clothing.”

“Oh, uh, that’s not really necessary…” Fellis shifted uncomfortably, trying not to draw attention to how ridiculous she looked trying to keep modest under the blanket she’d borrowed. “When you say ‘buy’, you mean with like, fuckin’ money, right? ‘Cause no offense, but you don’t exactly seem to be… like, in a position to be tossing the shit around, eh?”

“It should be fine. We’re actually keeping ahead of our expenses these days, and Maggie here owes me a favour, eh?”

Maggie nodded her head in response, still tongue tied.

Louise leaned toward Fellis and stage-whispered, “Is that how I was staring at you when we met?”

*****

Back out in the cold winter, Fellis once again was drawing the stares of the village, but still none had the nerve to come talk to them. Louise felt a pang of anger when she noticed a group of her close friends looking away to avoid her gaze.

“Damn, it’s good to have something to keep the wind off me.” Fellis gracefully bounded in a circle, staring back at the heavy skirt covering her lower half as it fluttered slightly. “I would’ve preferred some boots of course, but I can live with cold hooves as long as the rest of me is warm, I guess.”

“I’m glad you like it.”

“I can’t thank you enough, really.” Fellis stopped in front of Louise and for a second considered hugging her, but decided against it, not knowing what people in this village might consider normal, friendly behaviour. “But, uh, is twenty dollars a lot? I mean, this fabric seems like, pretty good quality for something natch-made, and you got me so much stuff.”

At her insistence that she didn’t need much, Fellis was now dressed in much less clothing than anyone around, but still more than she was used to: a knit scarf, two shawls - one over her human shoulders and a larger one over her withers -, a bodice and chemise on her human torso, and two large custom skirts over her deer half - one thicker, long one on top and a decency skirt as underwear.

“Twenty dollars is a bargain for all we got,” Louise said with a faint smile, “You’re lucky I did some work for Maggie when her youngest was sick this fall. Of course, her being so stunned to see you made her easier to deal with than usual.” She continued walking toward their next stop, Fellis quickly catching up to walk beside her. “My husband and I make about fifteen dollars per week this time of year, but most of the time we make twenty to twenty five, and quite a bit more during harvest. We’re not exactly well off, but we’re not destitute, as much as you evidently find our home… humble.”

Fellis mumbled an apology at that, but Louise laughed it off.

“In any case, I’ll pay you back. It seems like I’m gonna need money to get to somewhere I can charge my synthesizer or get a cell signal, so I guess I’m gonna have to look for a way to get some, eh?”

“The way you talk about money… Have you never used it before?”

Fellis rubbed the back of her neck, slightly embarrassed. “Well, yeah… When I was young we had it, but I never really had the brain for finances, I guess. If you go into the corpstates, you still need it, so I have some cryptochits for emergencies, but I haven’t used them in years.” Saying this, she pulled a keyring out of a saddlebag. In addition to a pair of keys, the ring held five nearly identical finger-sized metal boxes, each adorned with a different logo. “I don’t suppose the bank here would do an exchange?” Fellis chuckled a bit at her own bad joke.

“So, how do things… work, when you have no money?”

“Mostly the same, I guess. Hard for me to say, I’ve never lived in a normal society that uses money.” Fellis paused a moment here, wondering whether to talk about her past and risk bringing up something painful. “I was born in wartime. The war hadn’t effected us much yet, but it did by the time I was old enough to understand that stuff. And the only places I’ve been that use money since the war ended are like, total fuckin’ fascistic shitholes. Uh, until I got here, of course.”

Louise mercifully changed the subject. “You have a job?”

“Not exactly a job, we don’t really use that word… I’m a nanosurgeon and transgenicist. Uh, I also have a doctorate in nanotech engineering, but I never do anything with that, I just got it out of convenience. Long story.” Seeing the expression on Louise’s face told her these weren’t jobs that were available in the area. “So, I guess I’ll be looking at manual labour, eh?”

“You mentioned you drink, eh?” Louise nodded toward a nearby building with a sign reading ‘Tavern’.

“Fuckin’ rights, I do.”

*****

“So, you’re really telling me you don’t think the last, like, two hundred and, uh…” Fellis counted on her fingers, obviously forgetting that she’d done this calculation about five times already. “… forty years never happened?”

Louise nodded and hiccuped, putting the empty glass she held down a little too roughly. The table now held ten such glasses. She waved over to the bartender. Might as well make it a nice, round dozen.

Fellis eyed the dust-covered piano in the corner of the room, as an idea struggled to form itself in her head. “You’ve never heard of, like, rock and roll? Disco? EDM? Fuckin’… jazz?”

“Are those -hic-… are those even words?”

“You’ve seriously never heard of, like, the fuckin’ Beatles? No Beyoncé? No fuckin’… Oh thanks, babe.” Fellis smiled at their server as she dropped off two more whiskeys. The poor girl looked about to faint, and quickly scurried away. “Ok, I’m having an idea. I could play some music.”

“Yeah, you should -hic- play some music from the future.” Louise drained her latest glass and stood up to head over to the piano, ignoring Fellis as she muttered about it not being from the future.

Louise soon found herself on the floor, with Fellis starting to lift her up by her shoulders. The room above her was spinning.

*****

Louise woke up tangled in her sheets, hair a mess, and still wearing half of yesterday’s clothes. Judging by the sunlight falling on the wall, it was after noon. And judging by how much that light hurt to look at, she was hung over. She turned over in bed and pressed her face into the pillow, trying to go back to sleep.

Several minutes later, Louise heard someone come into the room. She looked up to see her husband gently placing a glass of water on her nightstand. He looked at her with a concerned face.

Louise turned over, then groaned and covered her eyes with an arm. “What happened last night?”

Kevin sat down on the edge of the bed beside her. “I’ve been piecing it together all morning.” He gently moved her hair out of her face and pressed the back of his hand to her forehead. “We’ve had a number of visitors come by to tell me about it, actually. You and our new friend were asleep when I got home, and she was gone when I woke up.”

“Yesterday’s dinner?”

“Meat ‘n’ potatoes.” Of course. He chuckled, as if the thought of him cooking anything else was ridiculous. “The little ones finished off those biscuits, too.”

“Where’d Fellis sleep?”

“In here, on the floor beside the bed.” Kevin swung his legs up onto the bed and got comfortable, since it seemed Louise wasn’t getting up any time soon. “My side of the bed. Tripped over her on my way to the biff in the night, she didn’t even stir.”

Louise moved her arm down and looked at him with barely-opened eyes. “And now she’s gone?” Her expression was hard to read under the fatigue.

“Came back about an hour ago, insisted on giving me some money for the things you paid for yesterday, and the wall. Said something about making it by playing piano? Then she ran off to catch the train to Toronto.”

Louise sat up, took a sip of the water, and nodded to him to continue before sinking back into the bed.

“Soon after I woke up, Ernie from down the road dropped by, said you two had showed up at his. You were out cold, riding Fellis like a horse, and she got lost and needed directions.”

Louise pulled a blanket over her face and sat silent.

Kevin waited a moment before continuing. ”Three other neighbours came by, saying the exact same thing. And a few folk from town came to see what’s what around here.” He hesitated, debating whether to tell her who, exactly, had come by.

Without even looking out from under the covers, Louise could tell what he wasn’t saying. “I suppose the vicar and his pet came by to show their concern.” Her words practically dripped with contempt.

Kevin pulled the blanket down off her face and gently stroked her hair. They sat like that for quite some time before Louise broke the silence.

“Remember when we used to go out drinking?”

“We didn’t have children then.” Kevin smiled down at her sadly.

They both knew it wasn’t having children that had made them stop enjoying each other’s company. Up until Louise’s third pregnancy, they’d always managed to find time for themselves.

“Angela’s old enough now to take care of her brother some.” Louise sat up and rested her head and one hand on Kevin’s chest. 

Kevin sat uncomfortably. His wife had always been particularly amorous after a night of drinking. Back when he was the one drinking with her, it was annoying. Now it was practically painful.

“It’ll just be us, soon enough. Will you remember how to love me by then?”

Kevin got out of bed without a word and left the room.

As he walked away, Louise noticed a hole in the wall, at about eye level. Gouges in the wallpaper lead to a missing panel. It looked unmistakably as if someone with antlers had stumbled into the wall and ripped it open.