There is so much that needs to be done and you’re sitting there, judging everything! You could help, you know!

Timeline/World: Edge of Forever – Templum
Current Date: October 10, 2022

Character: Gabriel deWitte
Race: Human
Age: 61, physically about 21
Current residence: Trenton, New Jersey
 

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We hit a rough patch at work a few weeks back and I’m glad that I had time off lined up and I made sure that Shiloh had his time off at the same time. They know we only work together and if they try to split us up, we don’t work. It’s that simple and we’ve been there long enough that they know this better than not.

Plus, as is, at this time of the year, the major moving rush has come and gone. We still have daily jobs but we’re not running ourselves ragged trying to get everything and everyone moved within the day. During the rush, there are a lot more temporary people on the crew and there are usually five or six (or eight, as one day turned out to be) moves done in a single day by a single crew if the move isn’t too far or too big.

Two weeks of time off is what I call a good bit of time off. Up until this time, I’d usually schedule us a single week off in the earlier spring and one closer to this time of the year, a few days here and there as we got more time, but we hadn’t taken the usual week off in spring so, you know, it worked out, in the end.

Anyway, at the beginning of the week, about three weeks ago, we hit a weird sort of rush. A fairly big business needed to move—a temporary move as they’d had issues in the building and repairs were needing to be done but, in the meantime, everyone was being moved to another building—and it was quite rushed. People from our secondary location were called in and, thankfully, this building was a bit on the edge of either territory covered so it didn’t take long for that second team to come in.

One of the semi-recent additions to the team who, so far, had proved to be fairly good at actually doing his job turned out to be a completely useless idiot while we were all rushing through to get everything out. Everyone was masked, we all wore gloves, we had safety goggles on, and I had to actually talk Shiloh into that one because it was clear it didn’t sit well with him. Still, they were safety precautions we had to take and that was that.

But no, the guy in question was sprawled in one of the chairs that he’d possibly been in the process of moving and he was watching the rest of us do our little ant-jobs as we moved everything from the building and into the trucks. A few others tried to get him back on his feet, but he would have none of it. Mister the idiot was clearly having a better time of things just sitting there and judging everything instead of helping considering how much there was to do.

He wasn’t around for the week that followed. None of us really know if it was because he’d been let go or because he’d just decided not to show up. Thankfully, I managed to talk to the boss about letting us have those two weeks off after that one because we needed it.

Not so much just because of the one guy but because we were overdue and we usually took one around that timeframe, it just so happened that it all came together at that point. He was grateful we’d at least been around for the big rushed move and that’s fine by me and by everyone else, I’m sure.

We go back in a couple more days. I’m curious to see who will be around when we get back. I mean, most of the regular crew are good people. There are a couple of idiots, but we’re rarely set to work with them. We get along with nearly everyone and that’s a bit of a necessity in this line of work. I want to be able to trust the people I work with. I don’t want to be carrying something heavy only for the other person carrying the item to just drop it because they feel like it.

That might seem like a really random thing to think about, but it happened before. I wasn’t the one it happened to, but I’ve seen it happen and it resulted in someone needing medical leave and in the other guy not lasting a minute longer on the team. The poor sap who’d been carrying the desk along with him had been the one going down the stairs first and the one who got fired decided that the desk was too heavy, and he was letting it go.

Except he didn’t warn that he was lowering it down. He didn’t warn that he was getting winded. He just dropped his hold. Didn’t lower it, didn’t set it down. Let it go. The guy further downstairs got the brunt of the desk falling and sliding down a couple of steps. Thankfully, though, he didn’t lose any limbs, that’d have been really shitty.

Final Word Count: 850

Sometimes you need to spread your wings. Preferably not in my living room.

 
Timeline/World: Edge of Forever – Templum
Characters: Gabriel deWitte
Race: Human
Age: 60, physically about 19
Current residence: Trenton, New Jersey
Final Word Count: 749 words
 

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Movies aren’t a common thing in the apartment. Between my need for things written down or I tend to think myself into a corner, Shiloh being near exactly the same, Morael potentially having some interest but he seems to prefer the rare book, and Wilde spending so much time ghostwriting that he seems to not have much of a care for movies, I don’t think that the four of us have ever really sat down in front of the television set at once.

We have, on the other hand, shared books. Or, well, the rare time I allow myself to settle in to read a book is one thing, but I don’t know that Shiloh spends much time reading. I wouldn’t begin to truly know about Wilde though most of the book recommendations tend to come from him and he has yet to mention a book that I haven’t managed to read through. I really don’t read much but I do read. Gabriel most likely had to learn to read after he’d left the island, I don’t know that he cares much for books.

Back to movies. I think the last one I saw had something to do with angels and it almost made me shake my head. Here I was, trying to watch a movie about angels and almost dismissing it as too far from the truth. Me. One of four guys who survived the Beast and its Island of hell. Who am I to decide whether or not angels are real? I know that there are other things out there though we don’t see them much. I know that there are other immortals, but I’ve never seen an angel in my life, much as I’ve never seen a demon—to not call them devils.

All I really recall from the movie was one of the characters half-heartedly complaining that the angel staying with them was leaving feathers everywhere because they were spreading their wings, literally, in the living room, something they’d mentioned as potentially best avoided.

How is it that this single scene is the only thing that really got to me? It’s a bit sad if you think about it. I think it was last year or maybe even the year before that this happened, too. It was possibly the last movie I ever bothered to watch. Maybe if it had been about anything else, I might have remembered more than just that one scene and even then, I barely recall anything about it but those few sentences. Don’t even quote me on them.

It does leave me to wonder, though. I know there were birds on the island. I know that, at times, there were feathers to be picked up if you knew where to look but the birds didn’t seem to shed that much or lose that many feathers. Would angels be the same in that regard? Would they possibly lose feathers now and again—as we lose hair—or would it be more like the movie made it seem and it was just a constant mess of everything?

It doesn’t seem like it would make sense for an angel to lose so many feathers every time they even just move, you know? That’d be like someone losing a handful of hair every time they run their fingers through that very hair.

Maybe I’m reading too much about this. I don’t even know why the thought came back up to the surface at this point. I haven’t seen anything about the movie—I don’t even remember the title—nor do I remember seeing anything about angels though there was this woman’s office from a move a few days ago who had so many figurines and posters of angels, it was dizzying. I don’t know where her love of the winged figures came from, but it was a mess trying to move that whole thing without breaking anything.

She was making this huge fuss about every figuring we would pick up to pack up and I’m just like, lady, if you didn’t want us packing up your collection ourselves, you should have done so before we started helping with it so we could get the move done. I don’t care for people like that. They always wait until the very last minute before getting anything done and it delays everything else. Thankfully, it didn’t take us too long and she was out of our hair the moment her precious winged decorations were all packed up.

I thought I was going to be alone for Christmas, but I have you.

 
Timeline/World: Edge of Forever – Templum
Characters: Gabriel deWitte
Race: Human
Age: 59, physically about 17
Final Word Count: 722 words
 

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I don’t have any memories of my childhood. I honestly think I don’t have any memories of my time before Templum and I often wonder if that’s not something that was part of the make of the island and its source. I remember waking up the moment the train started moving but, otherwise, my memories of the first seventeen or so years of my life are just a blank. I know my name, I know my age because it’s in my paperwork, I know little else.

Every now and again—once in a blue moon, I’d say—I have dreams with people whose faces should mean something but they don’t. I think I might have had a pair of siblings, both possibly younger than me. I think there might have been someone in my life before the train, too, but that is even more vague.

A few days ago, I woke up with a start. The images from the dream were already fading, the memories, if that’s what they were, were disappearing and running free from my grasp and all I remember is a soft voice telling me that they thought they were going to be alone for Christmas but that they had me. For reasons that I can’t even put into words, that soft, whispered sentence made me want to weep as though it was there to remind me that I had abandoned someone who would have been alone without me. Someone who possibly was alone after I got on that train.

I’m not usually a very emotional person. I’m pretty methodical and if there’s one thing I learned from my years on the island is that I had to have things written down and a set schedule to follow as otherwise I would think myself into a corner and I’d end up being unable to do much of anything until I somehow pulled myself from the so-called corner and focused on something new.

These words, though. I don’t know what to really make of it. Anyone would tell me to let it go, it could very well be my mind just trying to trick me into something but there just was something to the voice. I know that it’s moot for me to try and find out who it might have been. It was more than forty years ago, there’s no point anymore. That person will have aged, if not died at some point in those last forty years. I don’t even know where I’m from, so it wouldn’t help.

One thing to understand is that time was hard to keep track of, on the island. Day and night blended in together rather well and the weather was always this sort of comfortable equatorial type weather. There were no ridiculously cold days, no steaming hot days, just comfortable days all around and it usually only ever rained in the evenings or at night. It was strange but as the island was a fabrication of its creator, it’s likely that it controlled everything that had to do with it and if good and warm weather made the forced residents more pliable, I’m sure that it was the point of things.

I only truly knew how long I’d been on that island when we made it off from there. I was so confused when I realized just how many years I had spent on there and, so briefly, after we had found a place to call out own, I wondered if my family had ever wondered about my disappearance. Which, of course, brought me back to the thought that I couldn’t remember anything from before the island.

Through Morael, I did learn that the Beast would pick up those without any true purpose, those it considered to be ‘lost’. Drug users, orphans, runaways, those who were deemed to have no future ahead of them. I suppose that it is that particular thought that put away my thoughts about what my family might have done during my absence. It is quite likely that I had none; or that they didn’t care much. I’m over the need to know more about who I used to be but that voice, it still clings to me a little. Christmas isn’t something we’ve celebrated since we came here and I don’t know that we’d ever start.

Oh, I’m sorry. Were you trying to talk to me?

 
Timeline/World: Edge of Forever – Templum
Characters: Gabriel deWitte
Race: Human
Age: 57, physically about 17
Final Word Count: 577 words
 

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The one thing I hate about this job and this particular work crew is that some of the assholes in the team think they’re just so much better than us that I have often thought of wrapping my hands around their neck and squeezing until there’s no air left for them to draw in. The issue with this is that I’m about as nonviolent as a flower. I don’t have a single violent bone in my body unless we’re talking about protecting the people I share my life with. These people are my brothers, though not by blood, but they are mine and I will keep them safe at all costs.

Now, there is this one guy. He doesn’t actually work on the moving teams itself as he works in the office but I still have to deal with him at least once a day when I go to punch in. That our boss still uses the old punch card system makes me smile a little but it does keep people honest; it’s pretty hard to change the hours on a card when you’re hardly in the building long enough to do more than punch in, pick up the day’s schedule and punch out when you get back in.

The asshole in question, however, works in the accounting department. The company I—we—currently work with is a pretty big one. It has offices all over the world and it’s not just about moving people and their furniture from point A to point B though it mostly is. We cover short and long-distance moves, we cover overseas too. Though these are usually just loaded into cargo planes and a team at the destination finishes up the move themselves but still.

Accounting jerk, whose name I can’t even be bothered to remember, has been in for three months, he’s in there only replacing someone while they’re on sick leave. The guy clearly thinks himself above a lot of people but he gives Shiloh and me a lot of shit because we look so young. He assumes that we’re high school dropouts—mostly me—because of how young we look. Every time I try to talk to him, it’s like he tunes me out and once I’m done talking, he turns to me, looking all surprised and tells me that he hadn’t seen me there, hadn’t heard me come up. How could he help me, he’d say and I did all I could to not punch him in the face because that would go into my file and I needed my file to remain spotless.

I don’t know how long it will be until Jerry comes back but I miss him. He’s a good, hard worker and he never gives me shit. He also understands that splitting Shiloh and me into separate teams isn’t exactly something that works out so well but the current asshole seems to not give a fuck, despite the fact that the boss made sure that our schedules were linked in the system, making it so that if I’m scheduled in one team, Shiloh is automatically scheduled into it as well and vice-versa. Somehow, asshole goes out of his way to split up the schedule bonds and the boss just sort of lets it go because, oh look, the asshole is his son-in-law.

I’ll just do all I can to keep my cool and I’ll wait on Jerry to come back.

I’m just here to do my job. Move

Timeline/World: Templum
Characters: Gabriel deWitte
Race: Human
Age: 57, physically about 17
Final Word Count: 557 words

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‘Finding yourself’, when you’re stuck in the body of a seventeen years old, isn’t half as easy as some people seem to believe. I feel terrible for Morael but not a single one of us survivor, of the few who have kept in touch, have any idea where he’s at, at this point. If we’d been able to, I know we would have all stuck together. There are three of us living together now; we all look more or less the same age—between seventeen and nineteen.

I was the first one to find a job. Shiloh was too unbalanced though he still mostly is and Wilde is so quiet that for a while I thought he was mute. We live in a quiet little four-bedroom apartment in case one of us ever spots ‘the child’, as we used to call Morael. He was on every train ride into Templum and out of it as the train brought the Beast more victims. There is no end for him just as there is no end for us.

My jobs vary; all of our jobs but Wilde’s own vary because he works ‘from home’. He sits in front of a computer and does his work perfectly well from there. It serves its purpose, no one has to see him and wonder as to why he seems to not have aged at all in the last decade or so. Shiloh tends to stick to the same jobs I do. They’re hard work most of the time but it feels good to be so exhausted by the end of the day that you can’t focus on anything anymore.

During the summer and now and again in the winter, we help movers. We work with a team here and a team there. Get in, pack up stuff, and get out. I try not to chat up the clients as that tends to lead to uncomfortable questions. ‘You look so young compared to the rest of the team!’ is one I’ve heard quite often. I feel I should be thankful that the men we tend to work with, in the summer, are aware that there is something different about us, that we’re not quite what we seem and they don’t wonder at how lack of ageing. I’m grateful for them.

Most of the time in the quieter months, we’ll be dog walkers, we’ll be snow shovellers, we’ll be doing all those odd jobs that no one else really seems to want to do but I don’t mind doing them and I know that Shiloh needs something to keep himself occupied. He still barely sleeps more than fifteen or twenty minutes at once and I have a hard time wrapping my mind around that, even though we’ve been around one another for more than ten, closer to fifteen, years now.

Not that it’s that hard to understand. Of the three of us, he was the one most often called into the chambers of the Beast and his mind has been scarred by those endless nights. I wouldn’t want to relive those moments myself, I admit. I wasn’t in its chambers often and yet, the times I was, were more than enough to leave a lasting bad taste in my mouth, I want to leave those years far, far behind me, far behind all of us.