Echoes of What Might Have Been

A Time Slip Flash Fiction Story

ECHOES OF WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN

Emily Voss opened the silver locket at Windermere's edge, where her ancestors had wandered since Wordsworth's time. Inside, no portrait—only an engraving: "Echoes of What Might Have Been."

The locket had arrived with yellowed letters hinting at an ancestress who'd fled across this very lake in 1847, abandoning a loveless betrothal. Emily sought inspiration for her stalled verses, but as the clasp clicked open, warmth flooded through the chain like electricity. Coal smoke laced the air. The lakeside path became polished deck planks beneath her feet.

She stood aboard the Lady of the Lake, a Victorian steamship cutting through Windermere's waters. Her jeans had become dove-grey wool, bodice tight-laced. The locket pulsed against her chest like a second heart.

"Miss Lavinia Voss?" A whiskered gentleman approached, eyes urgent. "Your passage was not announced." The locket pulsed harder, and her lips moved without her will: "The Carlisle connection, sir. Urgent family matter." He nodded, stepping aside. 

Memories flooded through the locket's chain—Lavinia's memories, becoming hers. The forced engagement. The desperate flight. The manuscript.

The locket opened of its own accord. Inside, miniature vignettes shimmered on pearl: alternate lives branching from this moment. In one, dutiful daughters fading to obscurity. In another, artists and agitators—Emily's own line, fractured by unresolved sorrow. At the centre, a blurred scene: young Lavinia at Dove Cottage, Wordsworth muttering over hidden pages.

"One altered line," he'd said, "might unbind fate."

She'd fled before acting. That hesitation had scorched through generations like ink bleeding through pages.

The ship's cabin drew her below. On the fogged porthole, ghostly script materialised—Wordsworth's lost poem, "Reflections on Borrowed Time":

Where Windermere holds time's reflection still,

One thread unpulled unravels all the rest—

The poet's curse: to know, yet lack the will 

To weave the gold from shadows we've suppressed.

The flaw blazed clear: that third line, "yet lack the will"—Lavinia's hesitation crystallised in verse, condemning her descendants to creative sterility. The Voss women would forever birth stillborn poems unless she claimed the quill now materialising in her hand.

But she felt Wordsworth's words dissolving as she lifted it, each one she'd change, erasing his from history. Her photograph tucked in the locket began to fade—her own face becoming translucent.

Where Windermere holds time's reflection still, 

One thread unpulled unravels all the rest— 

The poet's charge: to bend fate to our will, 

And weave the gold from shadows we've possessed.

The locket flared white-hot. Visions cascaded: Lavinia choosing love over fear; daughters painting fells in bold strokes; Emily's own verses flowing unbound. The photograph solidified, but Wordsworth's original stanza dispersed like mist over water, lost to all but this moment's echo.

The steamship dissolved. Emily stood again on the modern shore, notebook in hand. Fresh lines filled pages she hadn't written—verses both utterly hers and impossibly ancient, as if she'd always been meant to complete what Wordsworth had left unfinished.

The locket hung empty now, its inscription faded to mere scratches. But her pen moved with new authority across the page, each word a thread pulled through time, weaving the pattern Lavinia had been too frightened to begin.

Windermere lapped at her boots, patient as poetry, reflecting nothing but sky.