There are places where the boundary between past and present may be thinner than we imagine.
At least, that is the premise behind “Ohiosaurus Rex,” my latest short story for YouTube.
The story begins innocently enough. A married couple sets out on a sunny September afternoon for an Amish quilt festival in rural Ohio. Before they leave, however, a coworker gives them a peculiar warning about the area.
Later, one of the Amish men at the festival gives them another.
If they see something strange on the drive home, he tells them, they should keep driving.
Naturally, they don’t.
A pleasant September drive takes a strange turn
On the way home, the couple spots something flying above a lonely two-lane country road.
It has wings, but it isn’t a bird.
It has an elongated beak, a strange crest, and the unmistakable appearance of something that shouldn’t have existed for millions of years.
A pterodactyl—or something very much like one.
That raises an obvious question: If one prehistoric creature has somehow appeared in modern Ohio, what else might be out there?
They don’t have to wait long for the answer.
What is a time slip?
The idea behind the story is the time slip: a supposed phenomenon in which a person briefly experiences another historical period as though the boundary between two different times has somehow broken down.
In a typical time-slip story, there is no deliberate time travel. Nobody climbs into a machine and sets a date for the past. Instead, ordinary people are going about their ordinary lives when the world around them suddenly seems to belong to another era.
Sometimes the experience lasts only seconds or minutes. Then normal reality reasserts itself.
That’s what makes the concept so useful for uncanny fiction. A time slip doesn’t require an elaborate science-fiction apparatus. It can happen on a city street, inside an old building—or on an otherwise unremarkable country road.
The frightening question isn’t necessarily “How do we travel through time?”
It’s:
What if different periods of time occasionally overlap?
And what if the boundary between them is permeable in both directions?
The strange possibilities of the Ohio River Valley
The Ohio River Valley has always struck me as particularly suited to stories like this. It is a landscape filled with old roads, wooded hills, small towns, farms, river bottoms, and layers upon layers of human history.
Most of the time, of course, a drive through rural Ohio is simply a drive through rural Ohio.
But fiction gives us permission to ask what if?
What if you turned onto the wrong country road at exactly the right—or wrong—moment?
What if something appeared in the meadow that wasn’t supposed to be there?
And what if, instead of you slipping into the past, something from the past slipped into your world?
That’s the situation at the heart of “Ohiosaurus Rex.”
And if an Amish farmer ever warns you to keep driving when you see something strange…
You might want to listen to him.
-ET