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Challenge of the Week XXXIX
You took your smartphone and moved back to 1984. For the sake of the plot, your phone works perfectly, but a condition of your year-long relocation in time is no one can see it, or know about it. You are to report back to 2023 the contrasts: With people, music, overall humanity, anything. Send texts, pics, videos, undetected. The elite group with whom you work has cracked the code of time travel and intervention, and while the race to colonize Mars rages on, your group has decided to instead go back to 1984 to reset the world, so to speak. Before that power leaves a seamless, yet indelible mark on the future, the group has to decide if it's for the better, or to go ahead and let it all run the course it's on, and start looking skyward for continuation. Make it funny, make it deep, make it dark, make it yours. Entry with the most likes takes the $25 wire. Go.

In the Alfalfa

The street is quiet as I stroll the rural Mexico neighborhood. My cellphone weighs heavily in my backpack. A small mountain looms just outside the neighborhood. It looks like a scout for the mountain range in the distance. This little barrio is my last stop. My year in Mexico 1984 has been one I will cherish. The people are friendly and kind. Strangers are a rarity and warmly welcomed. This neighborhood is miles from the nearby Aguascalientes and seems an oasis in the desert.

The houses are brightly painted as I make my way into the heart of the neighborhood. I hear the sound of a cow lowing from behind a wall of one of the houses. I stumble over the cobblestone street but smile at the quaintness of them. Suddenly, a young girl darts from between two houses sweating under the relentless Mexico sun. The first person I have seen. I watch her continue on past the end of the neighborhood and finally plunge into a verdant field of alfalfa and miraculously disappear, like the mirage I expect to soon appear over the baking streets. I turn full circle glad of the siesta that has gripped the residents and pull out my phone to document the scene. Do we stay or do we go? A chicken picks its way across the cobblestones. I wonder if chickens are on the manifest for Mars.

I wander slowly towards the green alfalfa and wonder how it is so green under the assault of the sun. As I approach, I see water gushing from a well filling various irrigation ditches that run off into the distance. I stand on the cusp of an agrarian paradise. Civilization behind and fields ahead with city only a smudge in the valley below. I breathe deeply. There is room here. Room for us all.

A thin voice reaches my ears. A nonsensical tune about cats and dogs and moms and dads and I realize I hear the girl. Singing to herself in the alfalfa. I pull out the phone quickly and record the song. Tears fill my eyes. She is lying in the alfalfa. Singing.

I reach down and brush the alfalfa shocked at how cool it is in the heat of the day. I step into the field and sink down to my knees letting the alfalfa swallow me in a riot of green ice for the first time that day.

I lay down letting the child's voice wash over me. A small seed of doubt works it way deep into my belly. I sit up and look again at the wide sky and the fields stretching into the distance and I am suddenly worried. The girls song has dwindled to a whisper and I smile. I think the siesta she was avoiding has found her at last. I worry about the sudden invasion of this space. I worry about the girl. Would her entire future be stolen for mine?

I retreat from the alfalfa loath to disturb the girl from her peaceful slumber. I slink from the neighborhood to the retrieval point.

My vote is Mars.