COUGH COUGH COUGH EEUUUUUURRRRRGGHHHHHH TOOOOOOO What the hell! I spit the foreign object out of my mouth. Was M. Night Shyamalan trying to murder me again? I sighed — it wouldn’t have been the first time. I took a look at the disgusting, slimy ball of garbage that was on the floor, eerily pulsating with a blue glow. Oops — I probably shouldn’t have tried to eat that. But! Before we get into more details, let’s back up a bit. You probably already know that time is not linear. Normal, mortal, tangible beings can only exist in one timestream so that’s how they experience time. But the nature of time itself is more like an electric current; it behaves when there’s a conductor it can follow, but in the absence of structure it ebbs and flows, branching out in all directions on the path of least resistance. My job, as a time decomposer, is to clean up loose strands that branch out from the main timeline by eating it up. You can say that I hate to see any time wasted. Sometimes that’s just an odd hour here or there that’s gone rogue, and that’s when you experience de ja vu. At other times, it might require rewinding entire decades that have split off into almost another parallel universe. It’s sad to see all those memories and possibilities and memories disappear, but only by pruning do we keep the main timeline strong. Anyways, the most annoying thing about my job is when stupid writers always try to create time loops, or this horrendous thing they call the “multiverse”. It doesn’t work — it’s like this huge Gordian knot of timelines that makes no sense, or it’s shabbily held together by two mechanical devices, called deux ex machina. I catch my breath and take a closer look at what the piece of trash I almost choked on was. ‘Avengers: Endgame’, it reads.