The Unstuck Nickel

"Got any two-percent?" The voice was a rasp, like dry leaves skittering across pavement. Leo finally lifted his head. The man standing on the other side of the counter was a collage of mismatched eras. He wore tweed trousers that were too warm for the season and a thin, synthetic jacket that seemed to shimmer under the buzzing fluorescent lights. His eyes, though, were the main event. They were wide and darted around the shop, not like a shoplifter casing the joint, but like a mouse watching for the shadow of a hawk.

"Fridge four," Leo grunted, gesturing with his thumb. "And I wouldn't. The expiry was last Wednesday."

The man paid this no mind. He scurried to the refrigerated section, his movements jerky and uncoordinated. The glass door rattled in its frame as he yanked it open and retrieved a carton of milk, its sides already slightly bowed. He returned to the counter, placing the milk down with a wet thud. The condensation left a perfect, ghostly rectangle on the worn laminate.

"That'll be two-fifty," Leo said, already bored of the interaction. He wanted the man gone. The air felt thick around him, charged with a strange energy.

The man fumbled in his pockets, his hands trembling. He pulled out a coin and slapped it on the counter. It wasn't a toonie, or any coin Leo recognised. It was a nickel, but it behaved as if it were made of liquid mercury captured under glass. The light didn't just reflect off it; it seemed to get caught inside it, swirling in iridescent patterns. The Queen's face was there, but she looked older, sterner.

"What's this?" Leo asked, poking it with a pen. It was cool to the touch, unnaturally so.

"Payment," the man hissed, his eyes fixed on the shop's front window. "Standard credit. It's good. It's solid."

"This is a nickel, mate. And it's not one I've seen before. You got two dollars and forty-five cents more for me?"

That's when the lights flickered. Not the gentle dip of a power surge, but a violent, stuttering spasm that made the entire shop strobe between light and absolute darkness. In the flashes, the man's face was a mask of pure terror. Simultaneously, the Slush-o-Matic machine in the corner, a relic from the early nineties, let out a tortured groan. The cherry and blue raspberry flavours began to churn at an impossible speed, the colours bleeding into each other to form a sickening purple.

"It's found me," the man whispered, his voice cracking. "It's smelling the paradox."

"Smelling the what now?" Leo asked, but his question was drowned out by a high-pitched whine that seemed to come from the very air. The bags of crisps on the rack behind the man began to vibrate, their foil packaging crinkling in unison. A bottle of orange pop exploded in the fridge, the sound muffled by the glass.

A Leak in the Present Tense

The man scrambled over the counter with a surprising agility, landing in a heap next to the cigarette display. "You have to hide me! The divergence is collapsing!"

"Get off my floor! You're not a member of staff!" Leo yelled, pointing a shaky finger. But his bravado was a thin veneer over a growing dread. The Slush-o-Matic was no longer just groaning; it was screaming. The plastic housing began to warp and bubble, the cheerful cartoon polar bear mascot melting into a grotesque parody of itself. The spinning cylinder inside glowed with an intense, violet light.

"The coin!" the man shrieked, pointing from his hiding place. "It's a temporal anchor! It's too dense for this stream! It's pulling it closer!"

Leo looked at the weird nickel. It was now glowing faintly, the light within pulsing in time with the flickering overheads. He could feel a strange pressure in his ears, like he was rapidly descending in an aeroplane. The sellotape dispenser on the counter lifted an inch into the air, hovered for a second, and then clattered back down.

"Right," Leo said, his voice surprisingly calm. He had worked here for six years. He'd seen a man try to pay for petrol with a live badger. He'd seen a woman give birth in the sweets aisle. This was weirder, but the core principle was the same: a problem had presented itself in his shop, and he had to deal with it.

He grabbed the glowing nickel. The moment his fingers touched it, a jolt shot up his arm, not of electricity, but of information. He saw flashes of a city made of glass and light, heard the chime of transport tubes, smelled air that was clean and crisp. He saw the minting of the coin, the date clear in his mind: 2077.

The Slush-o-Matic machine finally gave up the ghost. With a sound like tearing fabric, it dissolved. It didn't explode; it just... unravelled. The plastic, metal, and frozen sugar syrup slumped into a swirling, multicoloured puddle on the linoleum floor, the light at its centre dimming and sputtering out. The whine stopped. The lights steadied.

The Traveller peeked over the counter. "Did you...?"

"Don't know what I did," Leo said, his hand tingling. He looked at the man. He wasn't a weirdo. He was just lost. And scared. Leo felt a sliver of something that felt suspiciously like empathy.

"The back door," Leo said, pointing. "Goes out to the alley. There's a service road behind the bins. If you run, you can hit the main street before whatever that was reboots."

The man looked at him, his frantic eyes filled with a dawning gratitude. "Why?"

Leo shrugged, gesturing at the molten puddle of slushie machine. "You're going to owe me about three grand in damages. Call it a down payment. Now get out before you melt my lottery ticket dispenser."

The man didn't need telling twice. He scrambled to his feet and bolted for the stockroom. A moment later, Leo heard the back door slam shut.

He stood alone in the sudden silence of the shop, the strange nickel still clutched in his hand. It felt inert now, just a piece of cool metal. The air no longer tasted of ozone. He looked at the front of the shop. The automatic doors, the newspaper stand, the first three feet of the chewing gum aisle—they weren't there. They'd been replaced by a shimmering, heat-haze distortion, a patch of reality that looked like a badly rendered video. Anything that crossed its threshold simply ceased to be. He watched a moth fly into it and vanish without a trace.

Leo looked down at the nickel again, then put it in his pocket. He picked up the phone and dialled his manager's number. This was going to be an interesting conversation.