How Hallie Discovered Time Travel
A short story about the intersection of space-time and Latin class
Hallie Palmer was sixteen when she discovered time travel.
Ms. Balsom segued into irregular Latin verbs after explaining the regular ones, in which you replace ire with one of five suffixes, such as io, imus, and iuit.
She spoke like a recording playing at half-speed, each vowel elongated, consonants rumbling in concert with the distant thunder of this stormy April day, pauses between words as wide as the Grand Canyon.
The class was so mind-numbingly dull that Hallie couldn’t even conjure a happy place in her mind, like the beach or a party. Her teacher’s words formed a tomb around her thoughts.
The sound of a thunk accompanied by the sharp pain of her head striking the desk stunned Hallie awake. Balsom was in the middle of a monologue about the second declination and didn’t notice that Hallie had fallen asleep, though Joclyn and Javier, who were seated behind her, did. They tittered in harmony. That was close! Adrenaline pulsed through her veins—if Balsom had seen her fall asleep, she'd be punished with an extra hour of Latin homework.
Hallie's eyes slipped downward as Balsom droned on. It was only a matter of seconds before sleep defeated her again. She angled her elbow on the desk and propped her forehead against the edge of her open hand to give the impression she was following along in her Latin book. Her hand shielded her shut eyes from view, and if she could avoid snoring (not that she ever snored, her little brother’s claims to the contrary) and her arm didn’t slip, she’d last to the end of the class.
“Negatives are among the simplest forms in Latin. Put non in front of what you want to become a negative. For example, ille non est meus liber.”
Hallie separated two fingers and peeked at the wall clock. She could have sworn the second hand was ticking slower than normal.
Hallie found the two-thousand-year-old silver Roman coin in her pocket, which her father had given her to inspire a lifetime of Latin learning. He wasn’t a Latin teacher, but rather a physics professor who thought Latin was the core of all knowledge. She pressed her finger into the nick on the ancient coin’s edge to pain her to wakefulness.
She glanced at the clock again, confused by the sight: 2:40. It was 2:52 the last time she looked.
Lightning struck the schoolyard, tendrils of white creeping into the classroom. Balsom yelped. The twenty-two kids in her eleventh-grade class jerked upright as if they’d suddenly been infused with Moxie’s Magic Posture Elixir.
Hallie's skin felt fiery, and a mighty wind gust rocked her body. The coin shocked her, a conduit for the lightning. She tried to let it go, but the denarius fused to her fingertips.
Dizzying multicolored lights flashed in front of her, like a tornado made from a rainbow. When the lights stopped, Hallie saw a bearded man with a tunic holding a wax tablet in front of a building framed by tall, vertically grooved columns. To her left, the sun wended its way toward the horizon, bathing the intact Colosseum in red.
“Quis es?” he asked.
Oh, crap.
After a moment, Hallie smiled. A sparkler sparkled inside her mind, showering her with great thoughts. If she taught the Romans English, Latin would become a short-lived, insignificant language. Yes! Then she'd never have been in Latin class, and wouldn’t have traveled back in time in the first place. And as a super bonus, Hallie Palmer would be the hero in the history books who rescued high schoolers from the tedium of Latin class.
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If you enjoyed How Hallie Discovered Time Travel, I think you’ll also like my story, Love Letters.
It's all Greek to me.
Nice! I had an amazing Latin teacher who brightened up class with tales from Pompei.