READER: Lately, I've found myself having the urge to rework old short stories I'd written in years' past. This one, Missing Time, is one such story. Revising a work of fiction you've previously written after many more years of living in this crazy world adds a completely different dimension to the work. It's also a whole lot of fun. I hope you enjoy it. If you missed the First, Second, or Third Installment of Missing Time they can be read at the aforementioned links.

Tim’s eyes snapped open. Disoriented, he struggled to adjust to the light pouring through the window. Rachel’s face drifted in and out of focus, and a chill prickled up the back of his neck and down his forearms.

“You came back before your hour was up!”

“Whoa.” Tim sat up, shaking the blood back into his arms. “That’s all I can say.”

Rachel tilted her head, smiling. “Good ‘whoa’ or bad ‘whoa’?”

Tim exhaled, his eyes still wide. “The sights, the smells, the smallest details—it was all there. Nothing could convince me I wasn’t with my father.”

A long silence followed, broken only by the deep, resonant chime of the session-ending gong.

Rachel folded her hands in her lap. “Tim, I’m thrilled with how this is going. But you have to remember—what you’re experiencing isn’t real. It’s just the DMT reconnecting you with echoes of the past.”

Her phone buzzed. She pulled it from her blazer pocket, glanced at the screen, then stood. “Excuse me for a moment.” The door clicked softly behind her.

Tim sat still, his mind buzzing with everything he’d seen, heard, felt. Nearly fifteen minutes passed before Rachel returned. Her face was pale, her expression distant.

“Everything okay?” he asked.

She hesitated, as if still processing. “That was my attorney. One of the patients in the program has gone missing. We’re being shut down—pending a full investigation.”

Tim tensed. “They can’t do that! For the first time in forty years, I feel... normal.”

Rachel shook her head, looking defeated. “They warned me. I didn’t want to believe them.”

“Warned you?” Tim’s voice was low.

Rachel sighed, rubbing her temples. “The data speaks for itself. People are healing—some, even cured. But my colleagues told me to be careful, to limit the scope. Psychopharmacology is an ATM machine for the drug companies.” For a moment, she seemed to forget Tim was even there.

Tim’s jaw tightened. “Right. Cures don’t exactly fit into their business model, do they?”

Rachel blinked, as if waking from a trance. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said any of that in front of a patient. That was unprofessional.”

She came around the desk and extended both hands to help him up. Tim took them, steadying himself.

Rachel pulled him into a brief embrace, whispering in his ear, “You are going to be just fine.”

Tim stepped back, nodding. “I know. And I have you to thank for that.” His voice was firm, resolute. Without another word, he turned and walked out, hurrying past the receptionist’s desk, past the waiting room, past the sterile walls that had somehow become the backdrop to his second chance.

On the way to the L train, Tim absorbed everything. The rhythmic clicks of the turnstiles. The dingy tile mosaic on the station walls. The indifferent sea of people, heads bent over their phones—except for one baby, staring curiously at him from her stroller. Their eyes met. She smiled.

This. He thought. This is all so beautiful.

At his apartment building, he punched in the security code, then patted the lump in his coat pocket. Relief washed over him—it was still there. Inside, he locked the deadbolt, emptied his pockets: keys, wallet, Swiss Army knife.

Then, in disbelief, he pulled out a half-eaten Tootsie Roll, carefully folded into its wax paper. He stared at it in disbelief in his palm. He paused for a second in front of the mirror in the hallway chuckling at how he had become a perfect caricature of his twenty-something self.

Tim shuffled to his recliner by the window, sat down, and took a deep breath. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the slim, black vape he’d swiped from Rachel’s desk.

Stealing it wasn’t his proudest moment. But he was too close to stop now. Besides, there were so many vapes and vials in that drawer—surely one wouldn’t be missed.

He let his eyes sweep across the familiar landscape outside: the bodega, the flower shop, the restaurant with its faded yellow sign. Then, he took a long drag, blowing an enormous cloud of vapor toward the ceiling.

One more hit.

Then another.

And then...

Light. Blinding, all-consuming.

Darkness. A vacuum of nothingness.

Then cold. A damp chill that clung to his skin. His breath hitched, his senses flickering back online. He heard the cawing of crows. The crunch of leaves.

And then—her voice.

“Timothy Alfred Johnson!”

Tim’s heart stopped.

His mother’s voice, sharp and full of authority, cut through the trees. She marched up the wooded path, not yet spotting him lying there.

“Boy, you’re in so much hot water when I find you.”

She was close now. Timmy—because that’s who he was again—propped himself up on one elbow. His eyes darted to the ground beside him.

The black vape.

Without thinking, he kicked it into the underbrush.

His hunch had been right. Two moments in time could be bridged. And somehow—somehow—he had stepped completely across.

A second later, his mother’s fingers latched onto his left ear, hauling him to his feet. God, how pain had never felt so good.

“Dinner is cold. I’ve been waiting for you for over an hour.”

Timmy blinked up at her, speechless. Tears blurred the fine details of her youthful face.