He hadn’t even meant to go into the kitchen—it was just habit. There was a little bakery down the road, and he’d planned to surprise Grace with fresh coffee and doughnuts. But as he was there, he grabbed a glass of water and, unable to resist, glanced at the crunchy nut cornflakes on the table. The same message, his message, was still on the box, but two things had been scribbled out and replaced.

“I’m Mark, this is my house I’ve lived here for 18 25 months, and Grace is fine dead.”

He snorted softly, so was this the punchline the cornflake conversation had been building up to? The whole situation had just hit ridiculous. Clearly, someone with a vivid imagination was pranking him for some reason. Maybe a streamer or blogger acting out an elaborate hoax: breaking into his house, planting a cereal box and then leaving messages…all while never setting off the alarm…?

Entirely possible. But he paused, mid-lace, as he noticed Grace’s shoes by the door. Of course, it was so simple, it was her, she just lied so as not to spoil the joke. Maybe it was a way to reopen the channels of communication between them. He snorted again, even more relieved. And—feeling pretty good about the fact she clearly wanted him back—he shouted over his shoulder: “Ha ha, no hard feelings, but don’t complain when I prank you. I’m off to grab doughnuts.” He bounced all the way to the bakery and back.

Already sipping his coffee, he found her in the kitchen, one foot tucked under her and the other resting on the chair’s edge, she was holding up the cereal box, turning it this way and that: “It’s not funny. I know it might seem harmless, but to me, it feels a bit threatening, it seems to imply I’m going to die. Have you reported it to the police? I mean, I’m assuming it’s not you, right? Otherwise, it wouldn’t have gotten under your skin.”

He stopped dead in his tracks. It was one of those moments when life seems to pause, even the next thought doesn’t come, and somewhere, a cinematographer is adding a Hitchcock zoom for dramatic effect.  

Aware he’d been standing motionless for a while, perhaps even with his mouth open, he recovered enough to say, in what he hoped sounded a casual voice: “Yeah, I was going to report it this week.”

The police station was, as it happened, close enough to his office that he had no excuse not to report it. During lunch, he reluctantly walked up to the front desk and, in smug self-congratulation and an attempt at self-preservation, announced, “My girlfriend wants me to report an incident.” He inwardly cringed as the policeman took details with more than one raised eyebrow. Fortunately, it was quiet enough that the man found it amusing, despite it being a waste of time. Cautioned to keep setting the alarm and assured he’d be contacted if any other unusual events were reported in the area, he left.  

It was a monumental waste of a lunch break, but at least Grace would be happy, and the entire precinct would have something to laugh at over coffee. Although police reports, incident numbers and Grace made the cornflakes feel like cornflakes again, all very tangible and solid—a real-world problem with a real-world solution—what if…?

On the way home from work he stopped at an electronics store and did what the crunchy nut cornflakes themselves had suggested: he bought a spycam. No point, it seemed, in setting them up all over the house, so after climbing on and off the kitchen cabinets for almost an hour trying to position the thing for the perfect view of the kitchen table, he stopped, satisfied his Mission Impossible antics would pay off.

Sitting down to a plate of spaghetti, he allowed himself to complete the thoughts that had up till now just been shadows of ideas. What if a future him was able to communicate via the cornflake box? If that was true, and Grace was going to die, could he prevent it? Was this a linear time situation where he would change something and the future would change? Was it a parallel universe of extensive similarities but subtle differences, one where it was already different in so many ways you couldn’t draw parallels between the two? What if their fate was predetermined and nothing he did would matter, Grace would die soon one way or another? And what if Grace dying was part of some plan and interfering would have terrible unintended consequences?

He tugged at a single strand of spaghetti and watched with curiosity as some moved—though not always the ones he expected—while others remained stubbornly in place. He’d read an article on quantum entanglement and, looking at the spaghetti, he thought perhaps that was the explanation for what was going on. Despite his pseudoscientific theories and the untold number of possibilities and outcomes and explanations, he knew one thing, he couldn’t do nothing. Just before bed, when he was sure Grace would not turn up unexpectedly, he wrote a new note on what was now an empty box of crunchy nut cornflakes: “Say I believe you ‘future me’, how do I save Grace?”

End of part 2