Rod stood over the kitchen counter, trying not to pour hot coffee on his hand as he positioned the mug under the carafe. Managing to spare his hand, but not the Formica, he reached for the roll of paper towels and struggled to tear off a sheet, ending up with an unmanageable wad. He smeared the stain around until he felt the cigarette in his mouth burn his lips.

“You alright,” Carol asked, looking over her shoulder at him as she scooped scrambled eggs onto a plate.

“I’m fine,” Rod responded. “I’m just a little jittery. I’ll feel better once I’ve eaten.”

The eggs on the plate jiggled as he took it from her. Carol sighed and wiped her hands on her apron.

“You’ve got to stop working so hard,” she said, carrying his coffee to the table and pulling out his chair.

“It’s not that,” he said, lighting another cigarette as soon as his plate was safe on the table. “I think I might be losing it.”

“You’re just now figuring that out?” Carol quipped, returning from the kitchen with a plate of her own. Rod was still puffing away, ignoring his eggs as she sat down across from him.

“Tell me about it,” she said, stretching a hand across the table. He dropped his cigarette in an ashtray and clasped her hand in both of his.

“We ought to have some control over our imagination, shouldn’t we?” he asked. “At the very least, we should know where the people and places we populate our dreams with come from. Last night, I saw her again. I saw the old woman.”

“Exhaustion can lead to hallucinations,” she said. “Didn’t you say you used to see things when you were in the army?”

“That was different,” he said, pulling his hands away and picking up the cigarette. “That was the result of days spent crouched down in a muddy pit with bullets whizzing over my head. This time I was under the covers in my own bed. And it wasn’t a hallucination. My eyes were closed. It was just something that popped into my head as I drifted off. It was an image that flashed in my brain. An old woman was standing in the doorway of our room. She was tall and plain, with short white hair and a floral print blouse. There was nothing sinister about her, nothing even remarkable.”

“Doesn’t sound so scary,” Carol said. “You were just falling asleep. People experience strange things sometimes before they go out.”

“But who was she?” Rod asked. “Why should my mind conjure the image of a woman I’ve never seen? How would I even come up with something like that? There’s nothing in my daily experience to tie it to. Even if she was someone I’d seen and not been aware of, why would I see her in our room? Why would I think of her at all? It would be like if the image of a specific rifle you’d never seen suddenly popped into your head in great detail. You’ve never had any interest in firearms, and you can’t recall giving a single thought to the subject. Why did you see it and where did it come from?”

“This is all rhetorical, isn’t it?” Carol said, sipping her coffee. “You’re going to give me the explanation as soon as I give up, and, judging by the way you’re inhaling that cigarette, it’s not an answer of which you’re particularly fond.”

“No answers,” Rod said. “Just a theory. I suspect what I saw didn’t come from within me. This wasn’t something conjured up from scraps of memory. It was a glimpse into an alternate reality.”

“But you said your eyes were closed,” Carol protested.

“They were, but only in this dimension. The part of me that traveled to this other reality had his eyes open. That’s how I know I was the interloper. The woman wasn’t in my room; I was in hers.

“Not saying I’m buying any of this but, if that were true, why would that shake you up?  It doesn’t seem like you’re in any danger.”

“What if it happens and it’s not an image flashing in my head for half a second? What if it happens and I get stuck? What if I wake up tomorrow and nobody knows who I am?”

A lot of men had returned from the war with nightmares, but in an imaginative man like Rod, those nightmare could lead him down paths that might not lead home again. Carol knew he would construct whole worlds around his delusions if left unchecked. Noticing he had dropped ashes on his eggs, Carol rose, picked up Rod’s plate and scraped the eggs into the trash can. Turning to ask if he wanted something to replace the eggs, she saw him hunched over a bowl, oatmeal dripping from the spoon he lifted toward his mouth. Stranger still, he was already dressed. Hadn’t he still been in his robe a second before?

“Tired of your own cooking?” he asked, grinning.

“Those were your eggs,” she said, gaping at him. “You got ashes in them.”

“I don’t remember cooking any eggs,” Rod replied, dabbing his chin with a napkin, “but I’ll be happy to take credit for it—minus the ashes.”

“I don’t understand,” Carol said.

“Don’t understand what?” Rod asked, pushing away from the table and standing. “Did I get my tie on straight this morning?”

Carol glanced at the knot and nodded. “You’re going somewhere?”

“You know I have that meeting with the network this morning,” Rod said. “Weren’t you the one who recommended I tell them to go to hell and walk out if they brought up the contract again?”

“But I thought the meeting wasn’t until Thursday,” Carol said.

“Which is today, according to my calendar,” Rod said, grabbing her shoulders and giving her a peck on the forehead. “I’m going to have to hire you a secretary so you can keep track of these things. It’s November, by the way.”

No it’s not, Carol thought as Rod scuttled off toward the briefcase on the counter. It’s December. Rod’s birthday was in a few days. She started to call after him as he left the room, to ask him if he was playing some kind of joke, but she turned to the pantry instead. There was a calendar tacked to the door, the weeks of the month spread out under the image of a turkey. She flipped it up to reveal the Christmas Tree on the next leaf. None of the days below the tree had been marked off. She let the page drop, slid the pen out of the rings above the turkey, and, seeing a check in the box for Wednesday, November 20, 1963, added one to the box after it.

“What if I get stuck?” Rod had said. Was that what had happened to her? Was she stuck? The only other explanation was she had lost her mind. If that were the case, how did she have memories of everything that had transpired in the month she’d lost? She wasn’t like Rod. She couldn’t conjure up and populate entire weeks with events and detailed dialogue. She remembered it all. The bills that she’d payed, the meals she’d cooked, the assassination. The assassination! It happened on the 22nd! It was going to happen tomorrow!

She rushed over to the Zenith and twisted the knob, looking for something besides soap operas, something that might indicate this world she was in was following the same course as her own. Switching off the television in frustration, she ran out into the driveway to see if Rod had missed the newspaper on his way out. It wasn’t there.

It wasn’t until her third attempt at spinning the dial on the phone that she was able to hear the buzz telling her her mother’s line was busy. She hung up and dialed Sally’s number, hearing Sally’s voice after the second ring. She had to find out if things were the same here, but how to do it without sounding like a lunatic?

“Carol? It’s kind of early in the day to be hearing from you,” Sally said. “Everything alright?”

“Fine,” Carol responded, relived Sally existed and sounded just like the Sally she’d known for fifteen years. “I was just wondering if you could settle a bet for me.”

“A bet?” Sally asked. “Sure. I’ll say anything you want for a cut of the winnings.’

“Rod said the President was in Europe for the next several days. I said he was going to be in Dallas tomorrow. I know it’s silly but we got into quite a row about it.”

“JFK doesn’t usually clear his schedule with me,” Sally said. “I’d like to be more helpful, but I really couldn’t say.”

She thanked Sally and hung up. At least she’d established Kennedy was President. Working on the assumption Kennedy was heading to Dallas, Carol called Rod at the studio. She told him about the conversation she’d had with the other Rod that morning. Then she told him all the details of the assassination she could remember. He didn’t say much, only that he would figure something out, before telling her he had to go.

That night, Carol met Rod at the door. He walked past her, tossed his jacket over the back of a chair as he passed, and headed out to the kitchen.

“Well?” she said, watching him roll up his sleeves and turn on the faucet.

“We’re sending a team to Dallas tomorrow to scout for locations,” he said, lathering up his hands. “I convinced the brass we needed to shoot a scene in a certain book depository. If this Oswald character shows up, he’ll find a bunch of people with cameras, mapping out potential shots. It might not work, but it was all I could come up with.”

“How did you get the network to spring for that?” Carol asked.

“I signed the contract,” Rod said. “I do another season for the same scant recompense, but they up the budget on the show. They’re coming out ahead.”

“Thank God you believed me,” Carol said, walking over to hug him. Rod stiffened.

“It helped that I’ve been having the same experiences, though, unlike my doppelganger, I chose to keep it to myself. Now we have to decide where to go from here.”

“What do you mean?” Carol asked, drawing back.

“We really don’t know one another, do we?” Rod said, drying his hands on a dish towel. “I look like your husband, and you look like my wife, but we’re strangers, never having met before this day.”

“I never considered that,” Carol said. “I suppose you’re right.”

“For all we know this happens all the time,” Rod said. “We wake up in a world just like our own with people exactly like the ones we knew, never suspecting the difference. Only this time, you noticed. Things were different enough, in this case different by a month, that you realized what had happened.”

“So what do we do?” Carol asked. “If you’re right, tomorrow we could both be different people who didn’t go through any of this.”

“We go on as usual, but we take notes,” Rod said. “We two are aware of the change. As we go on, changing things, if we did actually change anything, more of our doppelgangers will notice and take notes of their own. Anytime there’s a temporal difference, we might be able to make adjustments to whatever dimension we’re currently inhabiting. I suspect it doesn’t happen often that the changes we experience are significant enough to be noticeable, but…” he stopped, suddenly dropping the towel. “I seem to have lost my train of thought. What were we talking about?”

“You were saying we could possibly make a difference now that we know,” Carol said.

“We should always try,” Rod responded, but Carol realized this was a different Rod, pulled from some other November on some other world. She patted him on the chest, kissed his cheek and walked away to check the meatloaf she had in the oven. Somewhere, another Rod would be settling into his new reality, waiting for that jump into a world just a few weeks or months behind the one he’d just left, waiting to make a difference. She’d be doing the same, though she hoped she’d stick around this one long enough to see if it was possible to make a change, and that, at least in this dimension, the President would still be alive on November 23.