At 8:47 a.m., my toaster told me Julius Caesar had been assassinated—again.

“It’s the Ides,” it said, “third time this week.”

I spat toothpaste into the sink and wiped my mouth with a sock from the future. It said EARTH COLONY 9B—CLASSIFIED MILITARY USE ONLY and smelled like old oranges.

Outside, my neighbor Greg was in a heated argument with a centaur holding a clipboard.

“You can’t just graze in municipal zones!” Greg shouted, waving what looked like an ancient zoning permit carved into clay.

“I’m literally from the Bronze Age,” the centaur snapped. “We invented grazing.”

I waved to them both. Greg flipped me off. The centaur nodded solemnly.

The bus was late. Fourteen minutes and five centuries. When it arrived, it was more of a gilded horse-drawn carriage from 1542, but with Bluetooth speakers blasting K-pop.

The driver wore a powdered wig and looked over her glasses at my phone. “No enchanted objects on board,” she warned.

“It’s a Pixel,” I said.

“So am I,” whispered the executioner sitting across from me.

He had a melted iPhone cradled in both hands, watching what I think was a cat doing taxes.

“I miss horses,” he said without looking up. “Real horses. You know, from before everything collapsed and got scrambled like an egg in a time blender.”

I patted the chainmail near his shoulder. “Yeah, man. I get that.”

At the next stop, two more versions of me got on—one older, with a limp and a haunted look; the other younger, carrying a fish tank and a sword. Neither made eye contact.

In the office, my desk had been replaced with a velvet throne.

HR (now a plague doctor named Fern) said, “You’ve been transferred to Sandwich Ministry. 175th dimension. Congrats.”

“Do I get a raise?” I asked.

“You get a hoagie,” they replied. “Try not to cry on it. They absorb emotion now.”

Lunch was a picnic in the break room with Cleopatra and a humanoid AI named Jeff.

“I can’t eat this,” Cleo said, holding up a chicken nugget like it was cursed.

“Then may I have it?” Jeff asked. “I want to experience pleasure. I think that’s step seven.”

“I’ll trade you for fries,” she offered. “Fries are eternal.”

By the end of the day, I’d been yelled at by a caveman in marketing, written a poem about entropy for the break room fridge, and coughed up glitter for reasons no one would explain.

When I got home, my apartment was gone.

In its place: a crater full of VHS tapes. And Kayla, my ex from college, sitting on a beanbag that looked like it had thoughts of its own.

“I’ve been waiting 300 years to get my hoodie back,” she said.

I handed it over. She sniffed it and smiled. “Smells like bad decisions and college radio. Perfect.”

At 11:59 p.m., time reset.

My toaster sighed. “It begins anew.”

I poured myself a glass of wine from the 2400s. It fizzed blue and tasted like forgotten birthdays and burnt toast.

I sipped it while looking out the window, where a Viking was trying to teach a robot how to juggle.

Sometimes I think people are just paper bags full of echoes. And the bags are leaking. And the echoes are asking for something to do.

A Turkish writer, Sarp Sozdinler has been published in Electric Literature, Kenyon Review, Masters Review, Vestal Review, Fractured Lit, HAD, Hobart, JMWW, Trampset, X-R-A-Y, and Maudlin House, among other journals. His stories have been selected or nominated for anthologies including the Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, and Wigleaf Top 50. He is currently at work on his first novel in Philadelphia and Amsterdam.