That woman’s strangely dressed for 1889, the time traveller thinks.

She pulls out a glass rectangle and wordlessly hands it over. He stares, horrified, at an unfamiliar future.

Once he’s returned to whenever he came from, she sits and waits for the next assassin.

Somewhere nearby, a baby boy wails.

Phil W. Bayles has lived in Paris and London, where he’s written everything from movie reviews to mattress adverts. These days he lives in Derbyshire with his wife, his daughter and his cat. He writes very silly stories about very serious ideas, with the occasional poem to mix things up.