Sherry Whose-Last-Name-At-Least-Used-To-Be-Wilson

I know this probably isn't the best use for a time machine. But I've read that one Bradbury story about a dude who steps on a butterfly in the Mesozoic era and fucks up the rest of the universe one too many times, so I'm just gonna do it. I'm going to Battle Creek, to 1983, and visit my sister's mother. 

I should note that she isn't my mother--and really, my sister isn't my sister, and our father is barely her father, so it's all kind of a shit storm. She's Sherry Whose-Last-Name-At-Least-Used-To-Be-Wilson, and she is the background of a christmas card or two and a gigantic head of Farah Fawcett hair and I don't know what else. When my atoms re-materialize on the steps of the Kellogg factory, she is a neon blue double wide, and the steel doorjamb that burns my fingerprints off when I grab on, the silhouette through the seafoam blinds that grows into an open door.

And you know, I wasn't all that far off. Her teddy is as pink and as polyester as I'd pictured it, the hair as tremendous, and the Virgina Slim, is, indeed, one solid bar of burnt carbon. When she (somehow? miraculously?) manages to ash it into a Folgers can using only her mouth, I've decided to just fuck it; when she invites me in for pie, I will not tell her that her daughter will grow up to be a lesbian Chili's waitress, or that there will be a very regrettable picture of her in pleather on her ex-husband's mantle in Ohio for the rest of her life, or anything else she might want to be warned of. I know that if you breathe on a cockroach wrong in the past you're supposed to be responsible for Hitler winning the world war or whatever, but really, nothing changes. The trick is to be forgotten just as much as you were never remembered, to come and go and love nothing in between.

(Photo is by Gregory Colbert, again).