Saturday Afternoon

Sarah Thompson blinked awake to the soft chime of her alarm clock radio on the nightstand. The room was dim; sunlight filtered through heavy avocado-green drapes. She stretched, feeling unusually stiff, her joints aching like she’d run a marathon in her sleep. At 35, she thought with a yawn, these little creaks were starting to creep in earlier than expected.
She swung her legs over the side of the bed, her bare feet hitting the shag carpet. Something felt off. The mirror across the room caught her eye as she stood. She froze. Staring back was not the youthful face she’d seen the night before, smooth skin, bright eyes, the faint laugh lines just beginning to form. No. This woman had silver-streaked hair pulled into a loose ponytail, deep wrinkles around her eyes and mouth, hands spotted with age. She looked… 85.
Sarah’s heart pounded. She touched her cheek, watching the stranger in the mirror do the same. “What…?” Her voice came out raspy, unfamiliar. She glanced at the calendar on the wall: January 1, 1976.
That couldn’t be right. Last night on New Year’s Eve she’d gone to bed on January 1, 2026, after a quiet celebration with her grandchildren. She was 85 then, tired but content, reflecting on a long life. She’d blown out her birthday candles just a few months prior, turning 85. And now… No. This was backwards.
She rushed to the window, pulling back the curtains. Outside, the neighborhood looked frozen in time: boxy Ford Pintos and Chevy Novas parked along the street, kids in bell-bottom jeans playing in the fresh snow from last night’s storm. A newspaper lay on the doorstep. Trembling, she opened the door and picked it up. The headlines: “New Year’s Storm Dumps Snow Across Region.” The date: January 2, 1976.
Fifty years. Gone in a night.
Sarah sank to the floor, the paper crumpling in her hands. When she went to bed as an old woman in 2026, exhausted from decades of life, raising children, losing her husband, watching the world change with computers and phones in everyone’s pocket she’d been 85.
Now, waking up on this cold January morning in 1976, she was still 35. but her body told a different story. The years had caught up overnight, as if time had folded in on itself. Tears streamed down her aged face. The Bicentennial year stretched ahead, Concorde flights just beginning, Apple computers in a garage, a nation healing from Watergate. She knew what was coming: the joys, the heartbreaks, the inventions that would transform everything. But how? Why?
As the radio crackled to life with the morning news talk of post-holiday recovery and the upcoming presidential primaries, Sarah whispered to her reflection, “I’ve lived it all already. And now I get do it again?” She wasn’t sure if it was a curse or a gift. But one thing was certain: this January 2, 1976, was just beginning.
Sarah sat on the cold linoleum of her kitchen floor for what felt like hours, the newspaper still clutched in her spotted hands. The coffee percolator on the counter began its familiar gurgle, the smell of Maxwell House filling the small house on Maple Street. It was the same percolator she’d used for decades until the Keurig replaced it sometime in the early 2000’s. She stared at it like it was an old friend she’d already buried. Eventually she forced herself to stand. Her knees protested, but she made it to the counter. The wall calendar confirmed it again: January 2, 1976. A Friday. She was due at the insurance office downtown at nine. She moved through her morning routine on autopilot, every action a strange echo. The shower water took forever to warm. The shampoo was Prell, thick and green in the bottle. When she dressed, she chose a simple wool skirt and sweater clothes that had hung in her closet for years, now fitting a body that had suddenly caught up to the future.
In the mirror over the bathroom sink, she studied the face she hadn’t seen this aged since… well, since last night, in 2026. The same face, fifty years apart. She touched the soft folds under her eyes. “You know how this ends,” she whispered to her reflection. “You know every mistake you’re about to make.”
The thought terrified her.
She drove her ’72 Plymouth Duster downtown, the AM radio playing WLS out of Chicago Steve Dahl and Garry Meier doing the morning show, cracking jokes about the New Year’s hangover. Snow crunched under the tires. The streets looked impossibly clean, the cars were boxy and huge. No one wore seatbelts. A boy on a Schwing Stingray darted in front of her and she braked hard, heart racing.
At the office Midwest Mutual Life and Casualty, she walked past the rows of metal desks and IBM Selectric typewriters. Colleagues greeted her with casual surprise. “Sarah! You, okay? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
She managed to smile at Donna at the next desk. Donna was twenty-eight, bright-eyed, engaged to a boy in the Army. Sarah remembered the wedding. Remembering Donna’s divorce ten years later. Remember the cancer that took her in 1998. “I’m fine,” Sarah said. “Just… didn’t sleep well.”
All morning, she processed claims, fingers slow on the keys. Every policy she touched felt heavy with foreknowledge. A young couple came in to insure their first home. A man adding life coverage for his newborn daughter. She knew interest rates would skyrocket soon. Knew the housing crash that wasn’t supposed to happen for another thirty years. She knew which of these people would be gone long before their policies paid out.
At lunch she sat alone in the break room with a cup of coffee and a tuna sandwich on Wonder Bread. She stared out the window at the frozen Fox River. The weight of it all pressed down on her the things she could change the things she shouldn’t.
What if she warned someone? What if she bought Apple stock? What if she called her mother still alive in Florida and told her to see a doctor now, before the lump no one noticed until it was too late? What if she drove straight to the hospital where her husband Tom was currently a third-year resident, walked into the ER, and told him everything? He was thirty-six, handsome, and exhausted from overnight shifts. They’d been married eight years and were still trying for a baby. She knew they’d have two Emily in 1978 and Michael in 1981. She knew Tom would die of a heart attack in 2012, at sixty-one. Could she stop that?
The thought made her hands tremble so badly she spilled coffee on the table. By three o’clock she couldn’t stand it anymore. She told her supervisor she felt ill and left early. She drove aimlessly, past the high school where kids were getting out, past the A & P supermarket, past the little ranch house she and Tom had bought in 1969. The Christmas lights were still up on most porches. The world felt fragile, like thin ice. She ended up at the city park, sitting on a bench by the frozen pond. The cold bit through her coat. She watched mothers pushing children on swings, teenagers smoking behind the field house, an old man feeding pigeons.
Fifty years of memory crowded inside her skull. The birth of her children. The moon landing reruns on TV. The fall of Saigon late this year. Reagan. AIDS. The internet. 9/11. Smartphones. Her grandchildren’s faces. Tom’s funeral.
And now she had to live it all again, knowing every turn. A single tear froze on her cheek. A voice startled her. “Ma’am? Are you all, right?” She looked up. A young police officer stood there, concern on his face. Early twenties probably. Clean-cut polite. She almost smiled, he looked exactly like every cop from a hundred TV shows she’d watched.
“I’m fine,” she said softly. “Just thinking about time.” He nodded uncertainly and moved on.
Sarah wiper her eyes, stood, and walked back to her car. When she got home, the phone was ringing. She knew who it would be before she answered it.
“Hi hon,” Tom’s tired voice said. “Just got off shift. Thought I’d come over. We could drive out to the lake, get some dinner? Start the new year, right?”
She closed her eyes. His voice was so young, so alive. “Yes,” she said, her own voice cracking just a little. “I’d like that very much.” She hung up the receiver and leaned against the wall. One day at a time, she told herself. That’s all anyone ever has.
But for Sarah Thompson, on this cold January evening in 1976, one day carried the weight of fifty years.