“Target was our store,” Wes explained to Jace as they headed down the old, gray asphalt of Kettle Road, a four-lane highway that was long ago the main route into or out of town. “Whether I was at Dad’s or Mom’s, we got everything we needed there—so long as it wasn’t food, I mean. Clothes, TVs, video games… It’s just where we went.”

As his uncle changed the radio station again, Jace asked, “Why not food?”

“Huh? Oh, it’s not a Super Target yet. Won’t be expanded until 2003, I think. But it still has frozen meals and snacks. Anyway, we’re going mostly for clothes today.”

“I hate clothes shopping… And, man, Kettle looks like crap,” Jace commented after they passed by another batch of fast food restaurants and gas stations.

“Not like it looks much better in twenty-five years, either. Sure, the road is fixed up and most of the places had been… will be refurbished or rebuilt, but it’s never not going to be an ugly, three-mile long strip of dollar stores and pawn shops.”

When the Target sign appeared at the intersection ahead, Wes switched back to Royal Valley’s pop station, heard what was playing, and began to tap his hands on the steering wheel to the beat of Sheryl Crow’s All I Wanna Do. Thankfully, he didn’t go so far as to start singing along with it and embarrassing Jace as much as it was possible. Most of the songs across the stations were ones he had never heard, but there were a few that his uncle had played on Pandora when he visited his apartment.

So far on the drive, he had heard that song about not chasing waterfalls, the one about someone being a loser so somebody should kill him, a guy exclaiming that “this is how we do it,” and something about driving while sipping on gin and juice. He didn’t “get” many of them, but he liked that he could understand most of the lyrics.

“It’s all so easy to start singing to, once you’ve heard ‘em three of four times, you know?” Wes said and pulled into the parking lot. “Not that the present doesn’t have songs you can pick up too, sure, but I think in general you have no idea what the artist is singing about. That… or it’s just something about partying and drug use again.”

Jace shrugged. “I usually like the music more than the words.”

The two got out of the car and looked around at the shopping plaza, with the big, bulky Target its centerpiece. Next door to it was a piano store that would eventually be absorbed into its neighbor’s future Super variant.

“That place sells pianos?” Jace questioned.

“Yup. Tickling the Ivory—always thought it was such a weird name. I barely ever even saw anyone in there. Kind of a wonder it lasts another two years.”

“The whole plaza looks different. I think… only the shoe store is the same.”

“Ha, yeah, you got it. You really don’t appreciate just how much buildings swap owners over the years. Everything gets shuffled up over time.”

Once they made it past the sliding doors with the red frames, Jace was greeted with a familiar sight—and smell. The white and red warehouse-like place with the hundreds of fluorescent tubes had a familiar aroma and generally looked the same, although the neon light signage was an aspect long forgotten in his time.

“Okay, so the layout is mostly the same.” Wes stopped and turned to Jace before they had stepped off the entrance area’s gray carpet and transitioned to the tile. “You’re eleven. Lucy raised you to be a responsible kid. And I got a lot of foodstuff to buy for us. So grab a cart and go look around a bit, find yourself a few shirts and pairs of pants. Or shorts since you seem to like them so much. Just pick what looks good to you.”

“I… I dunno, I don’t do much clothes shopping… What if I won’t fit in?”

“Kid, it’s all 90s clothes, remember? I would suggest a shirt that has the words ‘No Fear’ on it, and maybe one with a Looney Tunes character that looks like a gangster. But stay away from any giant pairs of jeans. They will not look good on you.”

“Uncle Wes, I’m not sure… I’m kinda still scared about being alone.”

“C’mon, Jace. You know this store. It just has fewer groceries now. Go out there and see stuff. We’re gonna be here for a bit. I have a lot of… things to pick up.”

Wes gave him a slap on the back, grabbed a cart, and headed off on his own.

Once his uncle had disappeared beyond the clothing and jewelry sections, Jace awkwardly pulled out one of the bright red shopping carts and pushed it across the clean white tile to the electronics section at the end of the store, since he was more curious about current video games than clothes shopping at the moment. Having been one of the shorter students in his class, he could just barely see above the handlebar.

On the way, he paid attention to the families walking around, to see what the kids were wearing. He didn’t like most of what he saw, and by the time he was approaching the glass cabinets filled with boxed 16-bit cartridges, he had all but decided to simply try and pick out clothing that would form a close approximation to his modern outfit.

He paused before passing the movie and music section to look around. He noticed that the CD selection was about as big as the future version of the store. But in this time, it was more of an emerging media than one that had experienced its peak and was diminishing. Movie-wise, the shelves were all filled with videotapes, the Disney ones in their bigger “book” type packaging. He had never seen a tape in person, but examples of people enjoying the VHS era had appeared in scenes in many of his uncle’s movies.

He pushed his cart up to the video game aisle, left it by the end cap, and went in for a closer look. All of the cases were behind glass, instead of being out and attached to pullable cords that would let him see the back. He first took in the sight of the small Sony PlayStation portion of the shelves, brand new and only having about a dozen games. In between it and the soon-to-disappear Nintendo Entertainment System section was a sliver of discs for the Sega Saturn, next to the last of the company’s Genesis games, its star being the fastest ever blue hedgehog’s Sonic & Knuckles.

By far the largest selection was the Super Nintendo’s library, and it was a good year for the system. Titles like the sci-fi sidescrollers Super Metroid and Megaman 7, and the roleplaying game Chrono Trigger, coincidentally about time travelers, were all at the top of the shelf. The gorilla-platformer Donkey Kong Country and the quirky modern-day RPG Earthbound, in its big box that came with a player’s guide, were also standouts.

He recognized a few of the titles from the times that his uncle had gone into long rants about this era being the pinnacle of gaming, but he was more taken aback by the fact that the store was asking for $70 for some of them. Kirby’s Dreamland 2, the pink puffball’s sequel in the Game Boy partition, was cheap by comparison at thirty bucks.

He swung around the back to check out the television display wall and had to let out a small laugh. With all twenty of the big old tube sets playing The Lion King, only one of which could even break the thirty-two-inch ceiling, he wondered why they bothered to display them at all. Their screens were dark and low-resolution, the sound was either tinny or had too much bass, and even just the exteriors were too ugly for Jace to accept them as legitimate portals to TV land. How did anyone put up with them?

Then he remembered that he’d be spending any television-watching time with a unit that was probably even older than any of those on the store’s shelves.

He sighed to himself and returned to his cart—only to find that it wasn’t there. He glanced into several nearby aisles, and quickly realized that it was completely gone.

“Ugh, 90s jerks…” he grumbled, having concluded that someone had taken it.

Instead of going back to get another one, he proceeded to the toy section. Once he arrived at their colorful aisles, he had to take a moment to ponder a curiosity. A sign marker separated one section specifically into a “Girls’ Toys” zone, which was very pink. He had a very early memory of that still being the case when he was young, but by the time he was six, all of the toy placements had blended together. He remembered it being another one of those small changes that his mom seemed way too excited about.

He went through a few of the aisles and looked around. The Lego sets were interesting, as none of them were licensed yet, and they were all much simpler and less colorful. A former brickhead, he did enjoy seeing boxes of buildable to-the-point themes like Castle and Pirates, as well as the sci-fi underwater sets that made up Aquazone.

Aside from the masses of Legos, he also looked at or picked up and touched things like Power Rangers and G.I. Joe action figures, Nickelodeon’s toy that was little more than colorful blobs of slime which they called Gak, the tiny vehicles from Micro Machines—many of which were Star Wars related, and the equally small character of Mighty Max, who came with clamshell play sets that became animal heads when closed.

He had already learned about Pogs from his uncle, and the store only had a small selection left since the popularity of the children’s’ gambling toy made of milk caps wasn’t quite what it used to be. But across from them on the other side was something interesting: a modern and final variation of Stretch Armstrong, the man who had limbs that could be pulled to extreme lengths. There was one left in stock.

He picked up the box and looked at the sides and back, remembering having seen his uncle’s in one of his mom’s photo albums. He had gotten it on his ninth, maybe tenth birthday, and there was a picture of little Wes trying to tear the arms off with his ignored cake in the background. The snapshot had always stood out to Jace, because despite his uncle’s constant insistence that his childhood was amazing, it was one of the few pictures he had seen where Wes actually looked genuinely happy.

As he was looking at the box, something inexplicable happened. The cardboard shell jittered and distorted for a split second before disappearing from his hands. And it wasn’t like someone had just yanked it from his palms; though they retained their grasping position, it felt as if they were never holding the box to begin with.

Startled, he quickly found it back on the shelf, exactly where it was before he had picked it up. He tried to rationalize what had just happened, if it had at all or was only true in his mind. Cautiously and hesitantly, he grabbed a Street Sharks beefy shark-man figure container and studied and moved it in his hands in every way possible. Once he thought that the anomaly wouldn’t repeat, he began to put it back on the shelf.

And then it completed its return journey on its own, “jumping” from just inches away back to from where it had been taken. Freaked out, Jace took a step back and peered down at his now untrustworthy hands. He realized what might have actually happened to his shopping cart, and then began to question if he was still real or not.

“Jace?” he heard his uncle exclaim and turned to see him. “What are you doin’ here? Thought you’d be clothes shopping. We’re gonna end up doing it together at this rate… Not that that’s terrible or anything. I could… give ya some tips.”

“W-what are you doing here? Buying toys?” Jace asked, noticing that his uncle’s shopping cart was still empty. “Aren’t you s’posed to be getting food and stuff?”

“Yeah, yeah. I just wanted a look around first. Ya know, even after just being here for a year last time, the stuff in stock really changed by the time I left. Thought I’d see what the store was like the moment we arrived. Oh, hey! I didn’t know they had a Stretch in stock!” He beamed and went over and picked it up. “Man, it took me a week until I first came to the store last time. Must’a just missed him.”

“Uh, there’s something weird going on. W-when I picked it up…”

“Huh? What’s weird?” Wes asked and put the toy back.

Jace stared at his hands like they were ready to betray him again at any moment. “Maybe I’m going crazy, but the things I’m holding or whatever… They keep ‘glitching’ on me, like I didn’t touch them at all. What the heck’s going on?”

“You’re touching stuff and they… Oh! Oh, yeah, I remember that. My only advice is to not worry about it and keep trying.”

“Keep trying? What does that mean? What if I disappear?”

“Haha, you won’t. It’s not that dramatic. Same thing happened to me for a few weeks. I think… time just needs some, uh, time to realize you’re here. I guess when you travel through it, there’s a lot of displacement and quantum-y stuff that has to happen and be resolved. But don’t worry, you should become a true resident of 1995 soon. The glitch hasn’t happened to me yet since we arrived. Maybe the year’s still used to me”

“You know, you must be the worst time traveler ever. You have no idea how any of this works, do you? Did you even learn anything about it when you were here?”

“Never proclaimed that I did, kiddo.” Wes let out a sigh and looked around at the bright packaging with a smile. “Ya know, every time I pass by a toy section in a store, it brings me right back…”

“To what? Sitting around playing with toys?”

“No, to my crowning childhood achievement. See, Toys ‘R’ Us used to have this contest with Nickelodeon, and if you won, you got to run around the store for a few minutes and put anything you want into all the shopping carts you need. And guess what? I was one of those lucky few! I told you I was the ultimate 90s kid.”

Jace looked at his uncle incredulously again. “That sounds awesome and everything, but you’ve never told me about that before. So I’m not sure if you’re lying.”

“No way, no lie! Your mom probably just doesn’t want to talk about it because she was really jealous when I won and then sulked after I only got her a few Barbie dolls. And I’ve been kind of waiting to reveal it to you at the right moment, at an age where you might be at ‘peak understanding of something really cool.’ Is… that now?”

Jace rubbed the back of his neck. “I mean I guess that sounds pretty fun…”

“You have no idea. Maybe I’ll just have to convince you of its amazingness. Anyway, that doesn’t actually happen until next year, just before middle school.”

“I thought you liked this year the most.”

“Well, yeah. The Toy Run was definitely the highlight of ’96, but as a year in its entirety, this one’s still my hallmark. It’s just too bad we don’t get to see its first half.”

“That’s neat…” Jace said after a few moments of watching his uncle stare up at the ceiling in listless nostalgic bliss. “But I think I should get to the clothes.”

“Oh. Yeah. Heh, better hope they don’t flicker right off of you later on, right?”

“Maybe… as long as you touch them they won’t, since you don’t seem to have that problem, because you’re… more real or something?”

“Yeah, maybe. You really are smart for an eleven-year-old, Jace.”

“Too bad being smart doesn’t count for anything…” he muttered.

“What was that?”

“N-nothing.”

“All right, bud, I’m getting back to the task at hand. Have fun."