The Lawn Mower

Written By: Samuel J Hoppe

What a beautiful day. I thought to myself as I mowed my grass on my new top of the line mower. This bad boy could reach speeds of 25 MPH, pretty damn fast for a mower. You could start a league and race these suckers. 

“Stop! Look out!” A woman said to my right.

Was she talking to me? Where’d she even come from? I turned to face her and as I did I saw a small boy around the age of 5 run directly in front of my mower. It happened so suddenly. I could not stop. 

The front of the mower hit the boy in his shins, knocking him onto his back. I felt a few large bumps and then the screaming started. 

The screams were from the women. She fell onto her knees from the sight in front of her. 

I stopped the mower, jumped off, and rushed to the boys side. The entire front of the boy's body was sliced off. His toes were gone, nose was gone, stomach cut open, intestines showing, every inch of skin flayed off the body. You could see his knee bones. 

That's a damn good mower. I thought to myself. I took my flannel off and draped it over the boy's lifeless body.

“Murderer!” The woman finally rose from her knees. She had her phone to her head and I could only assume she had the police on the line. 

“Ma’am, I am so sorry. It was an accident, he came out of nowhere. There was nothing I could do. It all happened so fast.” I told the woman. 

“You killed him! You're going to jail! Murderer!” 

The jail cell door slid shut, the guard locked it and walked away. 

Manslaughter of a minor, that's what they took me in for. If only they knew how traumatizing this was for me. I didn't want that to happen! I just wanted to mow my lawn with my new tractor. 

A few days went by sitting in that cell. We get three square meals a day, we can bullshit in a common room, and are allowed to spend two hours outside. They've got a basketball court here. If you take away all the crazy people it's actually nicer than what I'm used to.  

“Hey you! Lawn mower murderer. You've got a visitor.” A guard said to me.

It was a man dressed in a suit with a briefcase. He had classified government asshole written all over him. 

He put his briefcase on the table between us and said “Mister, what I'm going to tell you may be hard to believe, but it's all true. Now I work for a top secret government organization. My organization deals with time travel, and potential future outcomes. We monitor people. We monitor who or what they become in the future, I'm sure it's rather confusing for you. But essentially we guide the timeline into its correct path by monitoring the future of people's lives and eliminating people that would do terrible things and corrupt our delicate world. The boy you ran over with your mower. Well, it turns out we were monitoring him. If he was not killed and was able to grow up and live his life, that boy would have turned out to be worse than Hitler. He would have overthrown our government, started World War 4, and would win.” The man paused to open his briefcase. Inside were pictures. He dumped them on the table. 

“These are all taken from the timeline where you decided not to buy that fast mower.” 

There were pictures of me with the boy with my old mower. Pictures taken from the sky? 

“Who took these pictures?” I asked. 

“We send drones into different timelines and have them monitor certain individuals.”

“Hmm.”

I scanned through the pictures and it seemed like everything the man said was true. I had killed the next Hitler. 

“What does this mean for me? So ill take the fall for murdering this child and secretly know all this information? Why are you telling me this?” I said, getting annoyed with the man. 

“Quite the contrary, Our organization wants to come out of the shadows and to be made public. We want you to be the face of us. Of the good that we can do. One boy today can save the lives of millions tomorrow. We want the public on our side and your story is the perfect way to make that happen. We’re going to release you from jail. You will be awarded a Nobel Peace Prize and 50 million dollars for your service to mankind, and to act as the face of our public campaign. You will be famous.”

“Fifty? Five? Zero? Million? Woohoo! Fifty million! What? You're serious? Nobel peace what? Oh my lord. This is crazy. Oh! You know what I'm gonna do with that money Mr. Government agent, I'm gonna start my own racing league of lawn mowers! Yes sir!”

The end.