I wish I had paid more attention to which turns we made, what direction we took, landmarks we had passed, etcetera. Maybe then it’d might be easier for me to travel back and forth to Elysia, considering he took us to the only constant ‘route’ around.

But I hadn’t. Instead, I napped.

Waking up was easy, or rather would be if this sudden migraine wouldn’t be so… apparent. Charles glances at me through the rearview mirror, clearing his throat.

“Have you ever heard of the Knights of the Round Table? King Arthur and Merlin, Lancelot and Lady Gwyneivere?”

I nod, remembering it quite barely from a LARP I had stumbled into after taking a few unknown pills and walking around the park for a bit. I shudder.

“Have you ever heard of the Mandela effect?” He asks, and a weird air enters the car. Everything felt quieter, stiller, even Vio’s snoring subsiding.

“No, can’t say I have, sir,” I add the sir out of habit, because of all the times I had, rather than being in the back of this old KIA, been in the back of a more significantly new cruiser.

“Nelson Mandela died in 2013, but some people remember him dying in prison in the 1980s, his wife, then a widow in that timeline, even giving a new covered speech about it. Many people have considerably argued that Berenstain Bears was spelt Berenstein Bears and that Oscar Meyar was in fact spelt Oscar Meyer at some point.”

“I don’t follow, sir.”

“There are so many dozens of people that remember these specific untrue things, but it is dubbed untrue by those who don’t have this recollection. What could this mean? Dozens of people having a specific memory of a timeline that does not exist in our world? Are their memories false, or are ours?” My head spins, his questions getting to be too much. He notices my look of confusion, and moves on to a different topic, Vio quietly listening beside me.

“Let's say you have a pair of binoculars, and someone slips an image into them. Now someone else separates the binocular pair and gives you one side. You see a lion eating a gazelle. Someone uses the other side and views a gazelle eating a dead lion. Who is correct?”

“I am, gazelles don’t eat meat,” I mumble, confused.

“The binocular sides are taken, and you both are asked what you saw. You say you’re right, and they say they are. You both saw what you saw, how can one be more correct than the other?”

“I don’t understand.” He purses his thin lips together, thinking for a moment.

“I’m just rambling, don’t mind me.” He concludes, hitting the turn signal as we make a left to an oddly shaped bridge, decorated in bright pink shells and old withered starfish alike. I drift off again, his odd tangents stuck in my mind.