7:48, and there were no parking spots on the streets. The show would begin at 8 p.m. Time to take a chance with the underground parking structures. The ten-dollar fee would sting a little bit, but there was no way I’d find a spot otherwise.

I asked my navigation app to reroute me to the parking structure. Traffic was slow-moving, cars piling up at the stoplights, clogging the intersections, and despite the entrance being just around the block, it would take me all of 6 minutes to get there. Dammit. You’ve got no choice.

To my right was the theatre, and its marquee sparkled in alternating lights. INTO THE WOODS, the lettering ran. CAMBRIA FALLS THEATRE CO. Traffic was slow enough that I took my phone off the dashboard and snapped a picture. I’d send it to Marisa later. She was the Baker’s Wife in this production, and she was who I was in town to see. She’d come so far since the Pucker & Clench days, when we shared a college dorm.

7:56. Shit. I entered the ramp down into the parking structure. A procession of cars in front of me, arms reaching out of driver-side windows to accept parking tickets from the booth. I was not going to make it in time. My only hope was that maybe the production might start ten minutes late?

The machine cheerily spat out my parking ticket, and the boom barrier raised to let me through. 7:59. With any luck I’d only miss the Prologue and the ushers would let me in through a side door during the applause before Cinderella at the Grave. Parking. Where was parking?

I descended one floor, then another. Then a few more. Every single spot taken. Seventh floor, eighth floor down, according to the helpful painted numerals on the pillars and the walls. How many levels did this place even have? The sloped rows of cars stretched downward and downward with no end in sight.

At some point the floors stopped being numbered and the walls became featureless concrete. 8:15, my phone said. If I found a spot now and sprinted to the stairs and bounded up the flights to street level, I could still make the second half of Act I.

At long last I found empty spots. A whole empty floor of spots—the lines of cars just stopped and I parked in the next available space. Perhaps we were just filling the floors one by one. I got out of my car, locked it, and looked around for stairs, or better yet, an elevator.

Weird. Wasn’t there a whole line of cars behind me? Where was everyone?

There were no stairs anywhere, but there was an elevator at an opposite corner from the side where I parked. It looked out of place embedded in the concrete foundation. Tall and imposing, its double doors gleamed in the dour incandescent light. There was one unlabelled button, and I pressed it.

One minute later, its doors slid open and I stepped into an impossibly sleek elevator carriage, upward bound. The air was cold and sterile, and I could not tell how long I spent inside.

I emerged at street level and rushed around the building to the box office, pulling out my phone. Was 8:30 too late? Would the ticket-takers still let me in?

The ticket booth. The face of a kindly woman with short, greying hair in the window. She stared at me quizzically. “How can I help you?”

“Is it too late to get into the theatre? I have my Into the Woods tickets right here,” I panted, scrolling through my email inbox to find the PDF.

“Into the Woods?” she asked. “We’re not doing Into the Woods.”

“What? But my friend’s in it, she’s the Baker’s Wife—wait, am I in the right place? This is Cambria Falls Theatre Company?”

“Yes,” she said, “and our current production is A Midnight Dreary. We’ve done Into the Woods, but that was like, twenty seasons ago.”

“But I have a ticket for it.” I finally got the PDF to load, and I showed her. “These are my comp tickets from Marisa, who’s the Baker’s Wife.”

She peered at the screen. “It says December 8, 2022.”

“Yep,” I was starting to get annoyed, “and that’s to-night, isn’t it?”

Then she stared back at me. “Oh,” she gasped, and that’s when I noticed that something about her was undefinably off, and the façade of the building looked different, and the cars passing by had shapes I’d never seen in my life.

“I don’t know how else to tell you this, sweetie,” she said, “but it’s 2043.”

“What?”

“I think you’re twenty years too late.”

Seeing the look of abject shock etched on my face, she added, “Let me help you get oriented, sweetie.”