short story
Camilla Winter was not an ordinary child yet she was neither extraordinary. All her life she has fallen, stuttered, mispronounced and gotten things wrong. A hell of a number of embarrassing moments, so when Mr Old Genie guy asked her which one moment she wanted to go back and correct she was in quite a conundrum as you can imagine. Should she choose that one time she was called on in 7th grade science, “What are wires made of?” the teacher asked. “Plastic” Camilla responded confidently. She couldn’t look anyone in the eye the rest of the day. Maybe the time she accidentally called her teacher “mom”. No she has to think bigger. After a great deal of pondering, and since Mr old Genie was getting quite irked saying he needed to go to Mt Everest to ski with another lady genie he met or something (Camilla didn’t really pay much attention to him), she knew which moment she had to change.
Mr old genie snapped his fingers four times, did a gratuitous little dance and “POOF!” in an instant she was back home, in her bed, the clock reading 7:10 AM on a Thursday morning and she just knew everything was right in the world. She quickly got dressed and headed to the kitchen for breakfast before school. She greeted her father with glee. He seemed somewhat gloomy today, she noticed. “What’s up dad? Are you not feeling well? Where’s mom?”. He hastily looked at her as if she had a tentacle growing out of her. “Do we need to take you to see Dr Sharma? Why would you ask that Camilla. I know how upsetting losing your mother has been for everyone.” That’s when it all hit her, flashbacks of her mom telling her how there was a fire in her company that day, a week ago, she came to pick Camilla up from school because she had vomited in the cafeteria. The day she just erased. The situation made her voice tremble when she tried to speak, yell, do something. Her knees buckled, there was a lump in her throat. She wanted to get out of there as soon as possible. This wasn’t her fault, but she knew it was.
The Butterfly Effect is an often-misunderstood phenomenon wherein a small change in the starting conditions can lead to vastly different outcomes.
