Tebita nodded as if she’d never been questioned at all, an auburn curl loosed from her plait by the movement.

Feeling almost all stupid most of the time was beginning to wear on O.G. She longed to be expert at something. Could someone just once not correct her on some basic element of life? No one had asked for a geography lesson in weeks – her most, her only, useful knowledge. She’d racked her brain these past weeks to discover a contribution to this community, a way to be of value and so to be valued. No one needed databases programmed nor spreadsheets reformatted nor accounts balanced. No one needed anything O.G. knew how to do, and she had never much liked what she used to do anyway. None of her clerical work at the zoo had made any difference in her old world of school shootings, pandemics, or the climate crisis.

O.G. at last sent broody Tebita into tiny hysterics with her impression of a biting fly, taking great airy chomps out of the teen’s arms and legs, Tebita’s laughter a remarkable fissure of immature giddiness and delight. Tebita had stopped taking secret naps in O.G.’s cottage and O.G. hoped it wasn’t due to a return to professionalism or a loss of camaraderie. Though their interactions were still superficial in language, they were fuller in emotion, in the way words were said and definitions asked, in the tones O.G. used, her manner with Tebita, Tebita’s availability, all these extra-linguistic elements completed the meanings around their words, the way the River, the one river, in its many states of being, shaped and fed the valley where she now lived.

O.G. pressed on for more vocabulary. A group of three boys fished from a hand net, their upper bodies where they stood waist deep in the water reflected back, doubled each boy into two torsos, two heads.

The old lady’s shape parted and joined that of the palm tree against which she rested. The melding and unmelding of person to environment wasn’t unfamiliar to O.G., who felt at unpredictable and erratic intervals incorporated, then impossible. O.G. didn’t think of herself as being from the future, couldn’t say such ridiculous words aloud to herself. The tram, the time-travel tourism that coasted from Seattle back to one place for a few moments in Egypt’s past, was a lark, a joke, a diversion for the other passengers. They’d complained it was too short, too restricted, only ninety seconds in this one spot outside of Abydos, just this one view of this one small caravan, and you could hardly see the natives. No one even noticed the crying girl. They paid attention only to the young men in an argument; they scoffed at the lack of clarity out the windows, the miracle of all the trams ever to tour the scene occupying the same place at the same moment, layers of tissue-paper-people, for those transcendent ninety seconds. A ninety seconds created by nature, even, the result of climate change. Nature crying out and still it was just an impediment to what should be better, more. O.G. shook her head free of such time-tangled memories, they made her too angry. All she’d done was taken action against a resilient past, jumped free to make a difference and help Tebita, the crying girl. Not unlike this blurry old woman, who looked after a little girl braiding grass.

O.G. composed a sentence in her head to ask Tebita what she thought of the sad man, but Tebita stared hard at the little trio, her green eyes sharp shimmers of Nile water. What about the group upset her? O.G. bumbled out her sentence anyway. It would take her several more minutes to compose a new one and her original enquiry plus tone of voice might bring them around to the topic of Tebita’s interest in the group. Tebita shook her head, said More – a word O.G. knew well – she used it every morning in reference to food, with an added hand gesture of frustration, a swirl of the finger tips with which O.G. was also familiar.

‘Yes,’ O.G. said. There was a noun tucked in there that Tebita had said in her own language, not the local dialect. A habit O.G. suspected and hoped Tebita employed from boredom more than spite. O.G. parroted the sound of the word, but not solid on its meaning, offered ‘Is that like, lots of picnickers? Or triads?’ in retaliatory English, and looked round to see if there were any more groups in kind. There weren’t. Not even in the fields around their swimming hole, where a few farmers worked at sowing the river-rejuvenated soil despite the state holiday.

Tebita stood and brushed off her embroidered dress, which was a shade of dusty red particular to her. The girl wasn’t from the Nile valley, but had lived near what O.G. assumed was an oasis in the Western desert. The Nile was perhaps the only river she’d ever seen. O.G. scolded herself for not being more culturally astute when Tebita rose and delivered a rapid, unpunctuated speech.

O.G. said the word that meant either slow or walking. Tebita was probably just testing her, or wanted them to leave right away for some reason, and O.G. looked around for scorpions.

Tebita ignored O.G., calling out to the three fishing boys and pointing back at O.G. as she strode away.

Responding to whatever it was Tebita had said to them, the fishing boys parked their net and trotted over to O.G. They chattered along, close enough to prevent O.G. from getting up and following Tebita, who headed north along the river instead of back to town. A panic surfaced, but if these boys didn’t know O.G. they at least knew Tebita. O.G. wasn’t a stranger, she had some protections. Or she used to.

‘Tebita! Tebita!’ O.G. called out. There were just three boys, all shorter than O.G., lean limbs muscled, teeth not yet ground away, eyes keen and secure. The promise of their future authority as males budded out their limbs like a tree in new growth.

They sang a song, humming first, then with lyrics O.G. couldn’t understand, and undulated their arms around O.G.’s face. O.G. sat there, looked up into a constellation of bright boy eyes and snakelike arms, the new grass steamed around her, misted over the atmosphere. she could almost smell the oxygen.

Though she only suspected the month, the season at least was still fall, but not her fall. Nothing here was hers. Fall in Egypt was the flood, outrageous insect blooms, catfish spawning in shallow pools, and small, many-coloured, song-filled birds. The very opposite of Seattle’s orange and red season of decreasing sun and rising knits, apples, a fresh, chill wind.

That same passel of younger boys who had been swimming appeared now too, water droplets from their bodies flew at O.G.’s face in intervals, applied river tears which mixed with her own.

skip down a stretch of Nile. Diana could get up and walk over. They could shake hands. She could stand over herself, smile benevolently, beatifically upon the great and famous O.G., the young woman who jumped the tram, her miraculous survival incised by her own hands into limestone cliffs for all the future world to see. Which was fine until the future had decided to rescue O.G. mid-jump from her tram and had stranded Diana, her famous nickname, Our Girl, now long abandoned, for fifty-two years in a present from which she wanted nothing. It was almost a song, the old lady who swallowed the spider who swallowed the fly. But where they were now, here, in Abydos, at the Nile, this was before all that, before the petroglyphs, before the rescue: this was O.G.’s first turn, the first thread, pure and gold in the tangled pile that had become Diana’s time-addled life.

‘A bug bite,’ Diana said when she reopened her eyes. She knew Merit would be watching her, would have stopped braiding her grass.

O.G., her slouchy modern posture the worst in the entire town, radiated self-pity. Diana snorted and turned away in frustration. Anyone who experienced time as a linear forward-moving force in their lives could indulge in the illusion of having killed their younger selves. The old me. An illusion stripped from Diana, who now had the practical chance. The still-thick and still-black hair falling over O.G.’s face, pliant brown skin, lithe senses coordinated by a pink and resilient brain; O.G. had everything she needed, not even recognising the good young boys who reached out to help, just because they did so in their usual chaotic and unfocused manner.

Diana had been led to believe, had led herself to believe, O.G. had flourished in Abydos, a hero, a master survivalist, the queen temporal émigrée of all time. Azim had fallen through the port like a slice of carrot dropped behind the stove; it was impossible for him to be rescued. But O.G. had jumped on purpose, they had both jumped on purpose.

One of the boys – Diana was pretty sure she knew him but his name escaped her – crouched down and stuck his face right up to O.G.’s, who was startled and swatted at the space between them. Diana had no memory of her life at this moment, but she had spent the last fifty-two years – aided by sound archaeological evidence – fantasising its content.

It was memory, true or false, and emotion, current or remembered, that let time sweep through her life in spirals, not the fact she’d jumped back five thousand years, twice, not even that she’d been forced to wait half a century before they had let her ride the trams again; all that was just logistics, was just branches on a tree.

Diana could hear O.G. call out again to Tebita. Even Azim heard from the water, stood up from his crouch and shielded his hand over his eyes to better see. Merit glanced up once but then made herself intent on fashioning a clasp for her corded grass. Diana had to grip her own hands together and press them into her lap. She unwrapped the remainder of the flatbread that was their small picnic to divert her shaking hands and pinched chest.

The boys began to split apart like a flock of birds. Diana, though the image blurred in and out of focus, could see O.G. was shaken, and when one of the boys at last made eye contact with Diana, the old woman gestured for them to scoot after O.G. and help her get back to town.

It was a small gesture on Diana’s part, her great age in ancient Egypt almost as powerful a tool as her fore-knowledge, yet she might have just saved O.G.’s life.

It must be so terrible, Diana said to herself, flush with power. It must have been so terrible, she added, the branches of her multi-foliate life fanned out around her.

O.G. tasted sand in her mouth. She crunched it often in her food and wondered for how long she would notice all this ambient sand, everywhere, all the time. The green along the sides of the trail thinned a little, as did the shade, though it still dappled the ground. O.G. watched the pink cracked heels of the boys who led her, watched them grow thin as they lifted from the soles of their reed sandals, then slumped back round and steady when they put their feet back down again. The shade thinned, made a variegated light, ran across the path this way and that.

Azim under living conditions that had begun, Diana feared, to strain her advantage. Azim was ignorant ancient Egyptian beginner, Diana was studied expert. He provided the livelihood, she offered her cultural expertise. But Azim became more independent every day, and Diana worried about her value to him. She was, after all, indelibly paired to a future to which Azim could never return. This brothers-in-arms displacement could be a comfort or, Diana knew too well, a torture, a constant reminder. Despite Diana’s desire to see herself, she’d instead spent her time in Abydos building her rapport with Azim. But here she was regardless, together, her two selves at the river. Was the past so strong it could pull you into its current, like an undertow, like a riptide?

The sun fired through thick clumps of papyrus, made their hollow stalks glow green with life. Now the boys had dispersed, various birds took up their absences along the waterline. An egret resumed its frog hunt. Other waterfowl peeked from the marshy grasses as if on cue, as if it had to be one or the other: birds, or boys.

Merit took her cord and fastened it around Diana’s wrist. A small, but Diana knew profound, gesture of trust on the little girl’s part. As the grass was still fresh and supple it stained Diana’s delicate skin. Eighty-two years old and from the future, her body, her age spots, freckles, wrinkles, all the stains of time upon her, returned to this moment by the stone breath she would soon lob, as O.G., five thousand years into the future.

Diana put her arm around Merit’s bony little shoulder and gave it a warm squeeze.

‘What was all that about?’ Azim walked back from the river, shook water from his dark hair. Diana barely noticed Merit scoot out from under her too tight grasp. If O.G. had seen Azim’s pants – pockets, belt loops, cuffs – she would have known he was modern. It was a close call. Fate had almost exposed her.

‘I have no idea,’ Diana said, an automatic lie to shield her flittering pulse. ‘Some domestic squabble between those two women, with I believe Katsenut’s twins and several others who might be from her brother’s farm aiding the melee. Those little boys are such gossips, aren’t they, Merit?’ The last bit Diana spoke in their local dialect, though without knowing a word for gossip, called them instead very-talkers. Merit looked up and smiled at Diana, but didn’t say anything.

Azim shrugged his shoulders and sat down cross-legged in the grass. ‘Coming here was a good suggestion,’ he said, picking up a round of flatbread, their daily bread, staple of their lives. He said this in English, to which he and Diana reverted when they were tired, or lazy, or didn’t want Merit to understand. At the silence that met his comment, Merit’s from incomprehension, Diana’s from the concentration it took to crystalise the present and lash it to her soul, Azim offered his open hand to a small green lizard ascending the palm just above Diana’s head. ‘Friend,’ he said to Merit in her language, ‘what do I call this?’