Shivering in the Boston air, I realized that Aaron Sorkin’s shitty Oscar would fade into oblivion. I pictured the gap that would inexplicably appear on his trophy shelf and I smiled. It’s the smile that I remember. It had been a long time since I had smiled.

This is a strange way to begin, I know. The Social Network cannot even exist for you, but I could not begin with the suicide. You must have patience.

I held that thought of Sorkin’s shelf as long as I could so I would stop visualizing what would have to be: shattered glass, a bloodstained hoodie. Murder repulses me; I want you to know that. I am, in my own eyes, a repulsive creature. I would have chosen another life. If events had taken literally any other course, I would have remained an underpaid, well-liked, and more-or-less happy teacher of physics.

The violence of it threatened my resolve that first time. I was capable: when I still thought I had infinite time, I used much of it to become an accomplished marksman. But in the minutes before the shot, it was still possible to return the rifle to my duffle, close the door of my machine and leave. I’ll admit I considered it.

If I returned to 2025, wrote a paper for a peer-reviewed journal and presented my time machine, I would have been hailed as the greatest mind of the 21st century. But in seeking fame and fortune, I would have been no different than him.

No, if I returned, it would have been to her, and it would have been to one of three times.

She was three years old in 2010. She wanted gas for her red plastic car. It was one of the Playskool ones a kid sits inside, with the big eyes where the headlights should be. Her flashing Keds ran it all around our driveway. She wore a Superman cape she had gotten for her birthday, and every two minutes she’d Flintstone the car to me, and she’d say, “Fill it up, daddy!” I would have gone back to that day, over and over, just to look on from the bushes.

She was twelve years old in 2019. She wanted a phone. I tried, halfheartedly, to convince her to get something cheaper, but she had her heart set on an iPhone, and I couldn’t tell her no: she was such a good kid, in every way. I signed the contract and handed her the phone, and her eyes lit up because she could talk to her friends like all the others kids did. I would have gone back to that day to snatch the iPhone from her hand, throw it to the ground and smash it with a rock until the chips and plastic were powder.

She was fourteen years old in 2021. She wanted to die. She followed the website’s instructions perfectly: she stood on the chair to loop the cord over the beam in her bedroom, tied precisely the right knot for the noose, kicked the chair aside and dangled until her pulse spent her last breath. I would have gone back to that day to come home one hour earlier and cut her down.

But that would not have solved anything. Not really.

Social media usage among teenagers spiked drastically about 2010. Between 2010 and 2014, rates of hospital admission for self-harm among 10 to 14-year-old girls doubled. Rates of depression and anxiety among girls shot up: a line graph depicting these rates bent upward so drastically that the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt described it as an “elbow.” In 2017, when British researchers asked 1,500 teen girls about social media, they consistently identified Instagram as the most damaging. Facebook employee Frances Haugen leaked internal documents in 2021 that show Zuckerberg’s company knew how much damage their apps caused. Facebook’s research found, and I quote, “Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression… This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups.”

Teens compare themselves to others. Teens rely on clicks and comments to bring them self-worth. Teens try to build themselves up by destroying others, like when Miranda Smith looked at my darling Jessie’s picture on Instagram and wrote an ugly slut like you would only get likes with a noose around your neck.

I carry the memorial card from her funeral, always, as a reminder. Jessie Marks, 2007-2021, and above that her beautiful, smiling, child’s face. You must understand how much I still love her. You must understand, too, that I have looked at that picture every day for many years, and I have never once been able to see her face without remembering those words. An ugly slut like you would only get likes with a noose around your neck.

Rage and pain remind me, as they must remind you, that to cut the rope would not be enough. They remind me that to murder Miranda Smith, as sweet as it would feel, would accomplish nothing. Neither action would save the others. You must understand these things. You must know it is all for Jessie, but it is not only for Jessie.

She was unborn in 2003, the time to which I travelled. Neither she nor I nor her mother ever set foot in Boston, or Cambridge, as I suppose the place is more properly called. But he did.

He was nineteen years old in 2003. He wanted fame, money, and popularity. He sat at a computer in his Harvard dormitory—Kirkland House—and devised a website on which male students would vote on which female peers were the hottest, and less than a year later, he would found Facebook. He would later buy Instagram, creating untold millions for his company and massive psychological damage for our children. But first, he would ask his friend for an algorithm to help his coding. His friend would write it on the Kirkland House window, and then Mark Zuckerberg would stand at the window to read it.

I had selected the SRS-A2 Covert, which offered vastly more range than necessary, but also great accuracy with a compact size. A standard length sniper rifle would be too difficult to conceal.

I did not know which window, not for certain. My methods at that time were not so methodical, and I had rushed my research. I am embarrassed to admit that I founded my plan on a movie: only when I knelt on the opposing roof, grinning like a fool about Aaron Sorkin’s missing Oscar, did I consider that he might have invented the writing on the window for dramatic purposes. I panicked. My binoculars shook as I scanned the wall of Kirkland House, whipping from point to point, searching for a marker scrawling on glass. There was nothing, nothing at all. I knew The Social Network was fiction, inventing some characters wholesale. How could I have been so stupid as to think Hollywood would pinpoint the location of a famous man on an infamous night?

I saw the marker.

I needed to be calm, unshaking, and I breathed as evenly as I could as I gripped the rifle. I watched the final writing through the scope. The penman stepped aside. The boy in the hoodie stepped forward. I saw the arrogant grin on his face, exhaled slowly as I had practiced on the range, and buried a .338 caliber bullet in his chest. Shouts and screams wafted through the night air as a young man bled to death on his dorm room floor.

His death might horrify you. You might remonstrate, He was 19, he had done nothing to deserve death. But he would have.

In my time machine, I read the prayer on the back of Jessie’s memorial card. Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us, and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. I flipped the card to the front and studied her face, tried to love her without remembering the words, but they remained lodged in my brain. Only the dates had changed: Jessie Marks, 2007-2022.

December, January, February. Zuckerberg’s blood had bought my daughter three more months.

Back in the future, I tried to understand how that could be. I had not missed: a certain Harvard sophomore had been murdered in his dorm room in October 2003. He had not created Facemash that night, nor Facebook after. Those domains and Instagram’s all remained unregistered. Without Facebook to blaze the trail, Instagram remained a figment in a future that wasn’t.

But in February 2004, a man named Jack Flanagan had launched FaceSpace, which grew to a billion dollar valuation. In 2011, FaceSpace purchased its upstart rival, E-gram. In February 2022, my daughter killed herself.

The second time was smoother. Flanagan spent spring break 2003 in Mexico, where an accident befell him while windsurfing. The Pacific hid both his unrecovered body and the two .338 caliber bullet holes in his wetsuit. His death bought a month-and-a-half: Jessie did not hang herself until mid-March.

I recognized the problem after eliminating Jim Baines, Marsha Robards, Deepak Singh and thus FaceHub, eTree, and ConnectMe. That trio, collectively, moved Jessie’s date of death only three weeks. The internet had been primed for social media. Zuckerberg had moved first, but he had not been the only. Many, many others would follow. Eventually, I even had to kill the Winklevoss twins. I tried killing Jonathan Abrams, too, back in 2001, but his murder did not move the needle at all. No one gave a shit about Friendster. It was Facebook that began the boom, or if not Facebook, each pale ghost that filled its void.

You will be tempted to stop. You will kill young men and women by the dozen, enough that you become good at it. Efficient. You will admire and loathe yourself in equal measure, and with blood on your hands and shoes, you will sit in your machine hurtling through the years, crying and wondering why. Then, you will take a picture of a 14-year-old girl from your pocket. You will feel her love and you will smile, fleetingly, before you remember. An ugly slut like you would only get likes with a noose around your neck.

As a creature who lives in its intervals, I have lost the ability to reckon time. I believe that in what you would call the last month, I have murdered 23 people. Jessie lives until age 17. Each new death wins only hours.

It’s funny, almost, to remember when I believed a single bullet could be the remedy. I thought Zuckerberg would fall and before his blood could stain the carpet, Jessie’s date of death would leap to 2080, 2090 on the card. I will never live to see that change. In the mirror every morning I see deeper wrinkles, more gray hair, less hair. Time travel breaks down the human body. I feel pain in my joints and chest, and I know that my remaining years will not complete my task. I will fail.

Listen. I began work on the time machine in December 2021, a month after Jessie’s original death. Building it took me four years. With careful notes such as I am providing, that time can be reduced, but you absolutely must begin around-the-clock work by February 2023. Begin any later and you surrender all hope; I’ve calculated. Jessie might seem fine if I can press on long enough. Without social media to poison her mind she will be happy, I know it, and you will think she will be OK. You will cherish her, love her, think it impossible that the apple of your eye could kill herself. If I murder enough people in my final years, maybe she will not, but it was Jessie’s suicide that prompted me to build the machine. Because I have forestalled her death, this message will have to be your prompt. You, man that I was, must understand: you must leave her to save her. Jessie carries that seed of destruction. If you do not do this work, if you do not return to 2003 to shoot a man named Mark Zuckerberg at Harvard University, Jessie will die at age 14 and the horror will return.

You will fear the consequences. Social media might seem new in your world, but it will not remain a harmless curiosity and it must be stopped. I know my actions have caused… alterations. With Facebook and its successors gone, some friends whom I will not name did not marry, did not have children. Other things have happened or failed to happen. I admit there are costs, but you must weigh them against the coming horror. You do not know what social media will do, to all of us, but especially to children. Jessie.

I leave you this recording, notes on the time machine’s construction, and the memorial card from Jessie’s funeral. I do not need it anymore, and if it cannot spur you to action, nothing will. Check it, daily. If I work very hard and live longer than I think, the year of death might change again.

I am also giving you a list of names, locations, dates and times. I have provided a photograph with each name; there are 1,417. If you use my research, if you do the work well and kill these first fourteen hundred quickly, you can build on what I have done. Every hour, every minute is worth more killing to spare a child’s pain.

Save them. Save her.

Snow falls into the waves. By the thousands, flakes unify with the water while I sip coffee and watch, separated from the chill by my sweater, the fire I lit upon waking, the tall pane of glass that overlooks Keuka Lake.

I dream of winter because the lake is for summers. It’s not cheap at any time of year to rent a house on a shore: if you’re spending the money, you do it when you can kayak or swim or fish, or at least read a novel in the shade of a tree without the upstate January driving you indoors. My wife and I married within sight of our lake in July 2008; since then, her parents have rented a house on Keuka for a week every summer for us to gather. Those seven days are a highlight of the year because they exist outside of man-made time, without external demands or appointment calendars. There is food; there is love; there is the water. Two million years ago, glacial ice scraped out the valleys that would fill. Since then, the lake has been. Lakes invite being.

We have a couple kayaks and a canoe in our garage where we ought to park a car. Between May and October, I’ll hoist the boats atop our vehicles, lash them down and drive fifteen minutes to the public beach, solo or with the family. We admire the various lake houses as we paddle. Our favorites are not the new constructions, whose thousands of square feet dwarf the family cottages they replaced. We prefer the homes that have been here for at least the fifteen years we have, the old favorites.

“I wish we could live in that one,” my daughter said once as our canoe glided by.

“We could have owned a lake house,” I answered. “I started college as a business major on a finance track. Fund managers make a lot more money than teachers.”

“Why did you become a teacher?” she asked.

“People in finance told me to expect 80-hour work weeks, and I knew I wanted a family. A house on a lake is no good if you don’t have time to be with your family. And I wanted to teach,” I added. “I believe in it.”

My own father passed on lucrative promotions that would have uprooted us from our home and schools; he did, genuinely, attend every baseball game and concert. I understood then, as his son. I understand as a father now, and I hope my children will, too.

Regardless, I chose my path. As I told friends at the time I changed my major, I did not want to dedicate my life to earning more money for rich people—I wanted to teach; I wanted to have a family. These were the right choices. There are good days and bad days, but I do not pine for a road not taken. My hours are meaningful and good. The road ahead has unseen twists and turns, and there may be bridges out. Accidents. I feel optimistic, though, that I can continue to glance in the rearview mirror and see a life well-lived. Be a simple kind of man, Lynyrd Skynyrd sang. Be something you love and understand.

A teacher can live securely, not luxuriously. It is still possible my wife and I could someday retire to a lake house of our own through a combination of prudence and luck, but well-lived lives do not necessarily yield dollars. I am at peace with that truth. All the same, as my kayak cuts through Keuka’s waves, I dream sometimes of occupying one of those homes for decades rather than a rented week. I dream not just of summer but winter days, of that coffee and snow on the water. I dream of watching seasons pass over the water a morning at a time so I am part of the cycle of the lake. Of being there.

I honestly have too many favorite reads and we could be here for hours if I decided to list them all so I'll only list the ones that I have read most recently or have gone back to reread a boatload of times.

Ranger's Apprentice and Brotherband: By John Flanagan. Two of my most favorite series, they are both by the same author and take place in the same world.

The Ascendance Series: By Jennifer A. Nielsen. I believe there to only be four book in this series but it is a very entertaining read full of twists and turns with entertaining characters.

Folk of the air: Holly Black. A three book series that I have read most recently and full of entertainment in the world of the Fae.

Court of Thorns and Roses series: Sarah J. Mas. I have reread this five book series too many times to count and I loved it.

Throne of Glass series: Sarah J. Mas. I also loved this series with many a plot twist and turns and and engaging series.

Crescent City Series: Sarah J. Mas. As well with her other two series this, currently two book, series held my attention all the way through.

Knight of the Realm: Jenifer Anne Davis. This series has three books and was very interesting to read.

Warriors: Erin Hunter. I haven't read this HUGE series in a while although it holds a place in my heart and on my book shelf, but it was enjoyable from start to finish... I believe it has over 60 books and is still growing with a large website dedicated to it and many fans.

Percy Jackson: Rick Riordan. This is a very popular series with a couple spin offs by the author and others.

Wings of Fire: Being another series that I haven't reread in a while, although it is dear to me and a fantastic series over all.

(1) The Thief - Ms. Megan draws you in with this simple story. Fun, fantastic world with its own deep history and religion. It reads like a YA novel, you could read this to children. It tickles your world building fancy and the characters are SO witty and story woven so well together you don't really think much of it.

then you find out there's a book 2?? but this book ended so well?....

(2) The Queen Of Attolia - Will punch you in the face and torture your soul and upend your sense of reality and it is by FAR my most favorite love story ever...

DO NOT read to children unless they can handle stuff like this. Some can, some can't. Read first before reading to them...the first few pages alone had my own gut in knots....

(3) The King Of Attolia - I love this book with all my heart. I had to buy a new copy recently because the other one was falling apart. You can LITERALLY open to any random page and start reading because it will be a "oh I love this part," moment. And here you get lulled....you also get slightly tricked...eee..its just so well done, KUDOS to Ms. Megan!

(4) Conspiracy of Kings - This one is more of a "while this was happening in Attolia, THIS was happening over HERE" kind of story. AND its a doozy. But with a VERY sad, yet satisfactory ending. I forced my younger brother to read these books and I knew he'd reached *ahhem* THAT *cough* part when I heard him go "YES! FINALLY! WOO!" And then quiet down with an "awww..." because it really is a mix of emotions.

(5) Thick As Thieves - Ms. Megan does something here that most authors wouldn't dare and you don't realize she's done it until this book.

she has neglected to describe a significant character in any significant detail until THIS book. But in THIS book she gives the description, but doesn't give the name...

BUT she's written the character SO well that even before the character gives himself away...you know who he is and you LOVE him! This book is MASTERFULLY written and bless it I cried and laughed and....oh I love this so much...

(6) Return Of The Thief - I had to wait an extra year and MORE for this, but I waited with gratitude because I was DONE with rushed endings (like from other series I'd read, Adventures Wanted- going back on their own lore, Summoner Series- so anti-climatic I almost cried, Rangers Apprentice- destroying Wills character for feminism. etc.)

BUT, I was NOT disappointed AT all! That stuff you missed in book three? yeah. even as I'm warning you, you're going to miss it. There are clues ALL THE WAY IN BOOK ONE as to why things are the way that they are...why does Gen make the decisions that he does? Why? Don't you remember the obscure hesitations...aaaaalll the way...back....in....book....one....

***I love this series. This author is a wonder. I want a movie, but I don't want ANYONE to touch it, you know? its too good. I'm afraid of what they'd do to it. I want it to be popular for Ms. Megan. but if its too popular then it will get a movie and heaven FORBID amazon butcher it like they're doing to LOTR...Makes me sick just thinking about it....

that just mean i'll have to produce and direct it myself someday. Get her permission and hope she holds onto those rights with an iron grip.

Challenge of the Week? This is what my heart wants. I love Prose. I've been writing on here since the start of the pandemic, and the weekly challenges kept me going through the difficulties of 2020. I've become a better writer because of Prose. I love the other writers. For no other reason than to be nice, I've received excellent feedback from fellow Prosers. The challenges keep me on my toes. It's a chance to be better. I'd say the only downside is the inconsistency of the weekly and monthly challenges. Please keep them going! It keeps things interesting.

Beyond the tall reeds, in clear view sits a humble abode where an old woman smiles wide while stirring her pots of comfort food, whistling a song I long to hear.

Out of range, even when I begin to walk away, somehow her words still reach me. The message is clear.

"Come home and I will feed you. You will always have a seat at my table, a place to rest, a place to break bread with all of us, but most of all, a place to satisfy your hunger."

I love having a platform for putting a wide variety of writings up for anyone that wants to see them (even if it's only 3 people), and I love that I can post a wide variety of pieces, from Bible journals to fantasy short stories, not to mention different genres that well constructed challenges inspire me to tackle. I also love reading the work of the many talented authors here on Prose. My only complaint is that I miss the old Prose site and wish it was working again. I dislike how images are covered up on the new site.

i picture you sit

bent forward on my bed

soft skin wrapped

in sunlit linen sheets

your naked back

reveals a universe

and golden curls

fall into your neck

the lines of your body

run into honey

colored hands

how deeply i long for you

each morning

in my chest my love

expands.

Lately can be characterized by lots of New.

i'm no longer sixteen.

i ate chocolate covered strawberries in the dark

with new friends,

threw the leaves and the bitter white crowns into

the grass that has the privilege of never missing a moonrise.

i envy the grass sometimes,

glowing in its frosty veil like a bride to everyone and no one--

perhaps the sun.

then other times i remember that the grass grows

to cushion falls and heavy footsteps,

to be chewed and spat out to the earth again and again and again.

there is honor there,

yet i am not sure i'd be content with constellations

to be forever scarred with paths that are not my own.

i’m in the mood to disappear

i tried, before

chewed tapioca pearls so they wouldn’t expect me to speak

they didn’t anyway, of course

i only got a stomachache

and a taste of modern friendship

like a mouthful of seawater

i could write a list--

carve it into the flesh of my forearm--

of all the places

i'd rather be

than here

me and my headphones

we'll have a grand old time,

they'll see

i don't think i was made

for this friend thing

or maybe that's the narcissism talking

all i know is the familiarity of my four walls

tattooed with pieces of poems

that make me feel something, anything

can i go back to being alone now?