Microfiction Practice #8: Design Flaw

[Don’t know what this is? See this post for some background.]

Prompt #979:

• Genre: science fiction
• Word: ferry
• Action: killing a spouse

Story (99 words, per Microsoft Word):

You could don the O’Tempora Timeshirt; then you could visit whenever you wanted. But once in a time, you couldn’t exit — not without help from someone at the admin console. Hence historian Rafe’s tragedy: after he’d left for his fourteenth attempt to witness John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry, his wife unplugged the admin console and headed over to eBay. “No Timeshirt available,” said her ad. “Works fine otherwise.” Rafe himself was wounded during the raid; the Timeshirt, discarded by a Union doctor, surfaced in a 21st-century archaeological dig, thus changing history’s course — certainly for O’Tempora, LLC.