Dear friend,

The Company is hosting their annual fall writing contest. Writing contests are great for pumping your inspiration muscles, so I thought I’d give you an example of something you could write to submit. The theme is “Out Of Time,” and you can submit your story here before November 20.

Enjoy!

When you become a time traveler, you’re suddenly far more wary of doors.

I darted through the crowd in the Stafford pubic square, weaving and squeezing past people waiting to see the execution of my colleague. Each body that pressed against me had a different scent of sweat brought on by the overbearing summer sun beating down on us. When I made it to the door in the stone building that, among other things, contained the jail, I checked the handle to make sure it was unlocked.

Inhale.

Exhale.

I creaked open the door and then stepped through.

The temperature dropped to near freezing. A bitter wind and a fifteenth century German castle courtyard greeted me. Not a soul or sound greeted me.

Dang it! I shoved my hands in my pockets as I marched to the doorway just across from me. Before I entered the next door, I glanced over my shoulder at the door I’d just come through.

Doors almost never brought you to the same place twice. It’d only happened to me once. I’d tripped through my closet door, accidentally ended up in the middle of a Catholic mass while still in my pajamas, immediately turned around, and found myself back in my bedroom. That had been my third instance of time traveling, before I’d had the chance to move into the TTA’s (Time Traveler’s Association) communal housing, which sported the least amount of doors for a building that size I’d ever seen.

I walked out onto the shop-filled streets of somewhere in Australia. The sun glinted off twenty-first-century high rises. Faux evergreen and red velvet Christmas decorations festooned storefront windows. People milled about in their shorts and t-shirts and paper bags filled with gifts. I sighed, opening a department store door.

And walked into perfume-filled department store air. Did I mention that time travel is finicky?

I spun around, muttering a “pardon me” to the lady I nearly walked into as she entered the store behind me, and trudged back through the door from whence I came.

Frigid air smacked my face. A dark, star-filled sky greeted me in the same darn German castle. I even came out in the same door I’d gone to Australia through. I sprinted across the courtyard, flung open that first door, and plunged through.

I was back in the 1630s Stafford square again, still full of people waiting for an execution. I laughed in relief.

Then the smile faded from my face. My colleague was still on death row, as it were. A couple of guards led a prisoner to the platform steps. I darted through the edge of the crowd, riffling through plans in my mind. I came up behind a stray guard, wrapped my arms around his neck in a choke hold, and backed into an empty alleyway. He flailed, his knuckles smacking into my cheek. I winced, but held onto him until he was limp in my arms.

A man on the platform in the square, the magistrate, I think, announced my colleague’s fake name and crimes of murder and treason.

I pulled the unconscious body behind some crates, taking off his helmet and breastplate before putting them on myself.

The man announced the punishment of beheading. I rubbed my cheek as I steadily marched myself up the platform, past the other guards. As they positioned my colleague on the chopping block, I tapped the executioner on the shoulder. When he turned, I socked him in the jaw. He crumpled to the ground.

The crowd gasped and shouted in a choir of voices.

I snatched sword from his hands, kicking at one of the guards holding my colleague’s arms. The man tripped and fell from the disruption of his balance. My colleague, a scruffy man of medium build in his fifties, popped up to his feet and kicked the other guard behind his knees. I swung the executioner’s sword between me and the two other guards attending the execution. They kept a wary distance that allowed first my colleague to slip off the platform, then myself. The crowd parted like the sea before Moses’s staff, and we darted towards the nearest doorway.

My colleague flung the door to the building near the alley where I’d stashed the unconscious guard, and we tumbled through it.

Right into the Chinese emperor’s throne room.

“Well, Dad,” I said to my colleague. “You’ve got us deep in it now.”

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