From a distance, it is possible to think nothing of the scene. It is an echo of history, a pleasant reminder that childhood play is timeless. Would that I could turn from the happy vision without curiosity, with acceptance of whatever it is, or was, or will be. But how can I? Who else am I but the one who creeps closer to make out their faces?

Only the closer I creep, the less I see, for the boy has no face.

He kneels, scrambling with his narrow hands as if looking for bones, the bones of the creatures he has buried. I can almost see the dirt caked eternally under his fingernails.

And the girl—she is not from the present. She is not from the future, either, but the past. When she turns her head to me, I cannot help but recognize the features of Constance Wakefield, not much older now than when I last saw her.

What else could it be but that Constance is playing alone in her own time, and the faceless boy in his, and they just happen to be playing at the same game, in the same place, as I see them in this fractured moment?

I feel like my mother, watching the ghosts of children unaware of the future.

The faceless boy pulls out a sharp black arrowhead from the dirt and presents it to the girl in his outstretched palm, showing off his treasure. Constance turns, her face lights up, and she leans over to look at the artifact, nodding in approval. And time has been ripped apart and resewn together, fused imperfectly such that a girl from the nineteenth century and a boy who has not yet been born might interact, might even touch, since she is reaching out now for the arrowhead still clumped with soil and bits of grass, to see it with her fingers, to feel it into existence.

I reach out as if to tell her to turn away, not to touch it, not to touch him.

It turns out, I don’t have to worry about her touching him.

The faceless boy—no, let us call him by his name—Julian rises to his feet, grass stains turning his knees a sickly green, and as he stands he thrusts the arrowhead at Constance with violent momentum, which carries the sharp rock into the girl’s neck.

Constance reels back with the arrowhead protruding from her flesh like a hard black tumor. She gapes at Julian—the boy who is capable of slipping through time to invade and alter the past.

Poor Constance does not know enough to leave the stone in place—I am not in the right time to tell her; I am out of time, or perhaps I am the only one within time—and from her convulsing throat, she yanks the stone free. A gout of blood blooms from her neck, her slippery neck, grasped by slippery hands, but there is no keeping it in; it streams from her mouth and from the pulsing gash, red, redder than a sunset. She falls, her throat gurgling. She coughs blood, like her mother. She pulls herself across the grass, away from Julian, who picks up a rock—Constance on her back, now, gasping at the sky—and he brings it down on her face. The rock craters her left eye, pooling red, cracking her skull like an egg.