It was all my idea. The stupid ones usually are. Once in a while the genius ideas are mine, too. Not on purpose, though. You know what they say: if you put, like, fourteen thousand monkeys in front of computer keyboards for a hundred years, aside from a whole lot of dead monkeys, you’d end up with one masterpiece among the garbage. Then they’d start teaching it in schools to make you feel miserable, because if a monkey can write something brilliant, why can’t you put five measly sentences together for a writing prompt?

This idea—I don’t know whether it was a brilliant-monkey idea, or a stupid-Antsy idea, but it sure had power to change a whole lot of lives.

I called the idea “time shaving,” which probably isn’t what you think it is, so before you start whipping up time machines in your head, you need to listen to what it’s all about. Nobody’s going back in time to nuke Napoleon, or give Jesus a cell phone or anything. There’s no time travel at all. People are going to die, though—and in strange and mysterious ways, too, if you’re into that kind of thing.

Me, I was just trying to help a friend. I never meant for it to blow up like a giant Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon that gets taken away by the wind.

Which, by the way, is exactly how the whole thing began.

On Thanksgiving morning, my friends Howie and Ira and I were hanging out in my recreational attic.