For this prompt, I actually wrote a different ending than the one I ended up using.  I thought I would include it here just for your own edification.  Picking up just before the narrator shoots the father:

I gave another hard shove against the door and knocked the man backwards. He tripped over his own foot and fell on his ass.  The door slammed back against the wall and I stepped inside.

He tried to get up and I knew he would come at me.  Luckily I knew of the troubles in 1932 Argentina and I came prepared to protect myself.  I pulled a pistol from my jacket pocket and fired into the man’s gut.

I grabbed the book and ran back to the point of origin.

When you travel from the future, back to the past, and back again to your own time, sometimes there are small resets to the timeline, subtle changes that are incorporated into your memory to help you adjust.  Bradbury wasn’t entirely wrong about his butterfly effect.  We were forbidden from making drastic changes.  No one was allowed to go back and kill baby Hitler, for instance, or start up Apple Computers before Steve Jobs, but the history of this comic book began and ended in 1932 and after that it became a “whale”, a book people spend their lives searching for.  So whatever happened to this copy, originally, there was little chance my taking it had effected anything.

Until I saw the headlines.  They flew by, filling my head with visions and information.  A young boy who saw his father gunned down in the middle of his foyer had developed a new obsession.  He became very single-minded in his hatred of all things American, and eventually that boy grew to power and was elected president of Argentina in what was reported to be another rigged election much, like the one from the Infamous Decade.

In 1964, the boy and his army launched an attack on the US, killing millions and injuring twice as many.  The country never recovered.  We did eventually fight back the Argentinian army and drove them from our shores, but the damage was done, making the great depression of the 1930s look like a trial run.

I was sliding through the 1990s when it happened and the changes in the timestream caught up with my 2040 and the man who pioneered time travel research was never born, his great-grandparents having been killed in the Battle of Boston Harbor in 1973.

I stopped sliding and found myself having covered the distance, thank God.  I was back in Casa Grande, Arizona, my hometown.  It had been rebuilt since the war years, and I was still here, so that was good.  But I was smack in the middle of one of the low points in comic collecting, right when everything went bust.

But, I thought, I could rebuild from here.  I’d made one fortune, I could make another. And I already had my first book.  In fact, many of those expensive books would be even cheaper now, so many years before the MCU spec began driving up the prices.  I looked down at the treasure in my hand, that copy of BALLYHOP that I’d been so careful of.  That’s when I saw what had been keeping the book on the table.  Someone had obviously set a teacup on top of it, and when the man fell, he must have jostled the table; there was a still-fresh ring of brown where the teacup had spilled.  All this, I thought, looking around at where I was and how things had changed, for a lousy tea-cup-marked cover.  The one copy in existence and it wouldn’t even make a 5.0 grade.

Then the memories came rushing back.  I had been ejected before the stream caught up and I suddenly “remembered” the story of the boy’s mother, who, upon seeing her favorite teacup lying shattered on the floor next to her dead husband, had been so filled with rage, she’d worked tirelessly to help the boy seek his revenge.  She was the true brains behind his presidency, but for a woman in that part of the world to take power was unheard of in those times.  I looked once more at the low-grade book in my hands and wondered if it had been worth it.

I sat down where I was, where the Arizona branch of the Time Institute had stood once upon a timeline.  I opened the book and started reading, breathing in that paper and ink smell.

Write a short story that is set in Argentina in 1932, in which a teacup plays a crucial role.

When I got into collecting comics in high school, I caught a lot of shit from normies.  Why are you reading comics, they would ask me.  Why you reading those kids’ books?  Are you too stupid for real books?

I shrugged them off and went back to it.  For years, I took hell over my reading choices.  Why would I read about a man being trapped in the belly of whale only to find salvation, when there was the story of Jo Nah of the Legion of Super-Heroes who got swallowed up by a space whale and gained superpowers instead?

But eventually reading comics turned into collecting comics and collecting turned into more collecting and soon my collecting spanned a hundred thousand books.  Which sounds like a lot, I know.  But did you know the first book to ever feature the words “comic book” on the back cover was THE YELLOW KID IN MCFADDEN FLATS in 1897.  A lot of people think is was FAMOUS FUNNIES in 1935, but that copy of YELLOW KID featured the words “comic book” on the back cover, and to me that makes me the first comic book.

See, I wasn’t happy with just having the most comics.  No, I’m a completist and I wanted ALL the comics.

I had hunted at conventions all across the globe, I had comics in every language and format.  I had war comics, romance comics, horror comics, pre-code comics, post-code comics, comics for kids, comics that were “suggested for mature readers”.  I had golden age, silver age, bronze age, chromium age, I had comics FOR ALL THE AGES.  And I wanted more.

By the time I had been collecting for a good 40 years, it was 2040.  Some computer at MIT had predicted this would be the year civilization collapsed, but for me it was the year things got interesting.

That was the year time travel became a reality.

In my own time, I’d completed a run of BALLYHOO, a humor mag from Dell Publishing that ran from 1931 to 1939.  This was technically a magazine—was in fact the foerunner to MAD Magazine—but the contents were a series of single-panel satire cartoons, and that, to me, made it a comic book.  What I didn’t have, though, was a single-issue of BALLYHOP, a one-shot satire of the satire.  It came out in September of 1932 but in all of my hunts, I’d never come across a physical copy.

The legend of the book loomed large, but I’d never talked to anyone who had seen it in print, nor could I find a digital copy anywhere.  Even if I had, though, I would still want the floppy; digital comics are okay to read, but they don’t have that smell and for me comics are a four-senses deal.  I read with my eyes, feel the pages with my finger, I hear the flip of the pages with my ears, and I smell that old newsprint and ink with my nose.  I had once bought a digital copy of ACTION COMICS #1, and it had scratched the itch for about five seconds until I “opened” that front cover and started reading.  I eventually paid $3 million for a mid-grade slabbed copy.  And then went back and forth with myself over whether to crack the slab and read it or not.  Eventually I decided not to crack the slab and read the digital copy, but it was one of the few exceptions.  If I hadn’t paid so much for it, that thing would have been cracked, read, and re-slabbed, probably at a lower grade and for ACTION COMICS #1 it just wasn’t worth it.

But back to BALLYHOP.  In 2040, I learned from a few different sources that there was a rumor of a copy last seen in 1932, the year it was published, that had made its way to Argentina.

I booked passage that day and by the next morning was in South America.

There was turmoil in Argentina in those days.  This was known as the Infamous Decade, marked by political coups and fraudulent elections, but none of that mattered to me.  I was only here for the funny books.

I’d done as much research as I could before traveling back, and I felt confident I knew where the book had last been seen.  I knocked on a door and waited and soon the door was opened by a young boy.

“Excuse me,” I said, “is your father home?”

The boy stared at me, dumbfounded, and I realized he probably didn’t speak English.  I asked again in Spanish.  “Discúlpame. ¿Está tu padre en casa?”

He disappeared into the house and I spotted the corner of the book on a small table just inside a little hallway.

A few second later, a man came to the door and, thankfully, asked in English, “Can I help you?”

“Yes,” I said, my speech well-rehearsed.  “Sir, my name is Robert Jay.  I’ve come all the way from America in search of a book I believe to be in your possession.”

My plan had been to purchase the book from him, as I’d purchased every book in my collection except one.  A high-grade copy of the first issue of TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES.  I’d owned a copy at one time, but a friend of mine, or someone I had thought to be my friend, had taken the book from the bag one day, bent back the tiniest bit of a corner of the front cover, then re-bagged it.  I discovered it some time later, knew immediately who it had been, so I stole his copy when he wasn’t looking one day.  While I felt totally justified in my actions, I always knew I hadn’t paid for that copy.

I wouldn’t let it happen again.

“I’m sorry?” the man said.  “I don’t understand.”

“If you’ll indulge me for just one moment,” I said, and pulled out a picture of the book’s cover.  I showed it to him and said, “I believe you have this book, and I would like to buy it from you.”

“What?” he said, now utterly confused.  I tried to understand, tried to remind myself not everyone knew the value of comics, especially in 1932 in Argentina.  In fact, I was relying so much on him having no idea what he had in his possession, that it would be a snap to buy from him.  But I didn’t expect this level of confusion and I wondered if he might be hard of hearing or if his English wasn’t as good as I’d first thought.

So I explained myself again, showing him the picture, then pointing to the corner of the book I saw inside his hallway.  He looked back, saw what I was pointing at, then turned back and shook his head saying, “No thank you, bye bye now,” and he started closing the door.

“Sir,” I said, sticking my foot in the door, “be reasonable.  I’m offering you a substantial amount of money for a book that cost you fifteen cents.  Please reconsider.”

“No,” he said, and he tried to shut the door on my foot.  But I was not budging.  I can’t have a collection of all the comics if I don’t have ALL the fucking comics and this was one that simply was not available in 2040.

“Sir, please,” I said again, pushing against the door.  “I’ll double it.  What I offered you before, I can pay twice that amount.  I would really like to buy your book.”

“My son loves this book,” he said.

“And with the money I give you, you can buy him many many books he loves.  I’m only asking for this one.”

“My son,” he said, “he is … special.  Not like other boys.  He likes a thing and that is all he sees.  If I take this book from him, he will not react well and that will be very bad for me.”

He was saying his kid was on the spectrum, which was a distinction I’m sure they didn’t have in Argentina in 1932.  But I understood it well.  My nephew had been like that with his clothes for a very long time.  But this kid wasn’t my nephew and once I went back to 2040, I wouldn’t have to deal with his fit, so I tried once more.

“Sir, I’m imploring you.  Whatever I can offer to convince you to sell me the book, it’s yours.  Whatever will make your life easier.”

“You leaving will make my life easier.  You leaving my son alone with his book will make my life easier.”

“He isn’t even reading it,” I said.  “It’s there on the table.  Maybe he’s forgotten about it and he won’t even notice.”

“He’ll notice,” he said.

Fine, I thought.  I could feel this slipping through my hands and I was about to start panicking so I did the only thing I could think of.  I made another exception.

I gave another hard shove against the door and knocked the man backwards. He tripped over his own foot and fell on his ass.  The door slammed back against the wall and I stepped inside.

He tried to get up and I knew he would come at me.  Luckily I knew of the troubles in 1932 Argentina and I came prepared to protect myself.  I pulled a pistol from my jacket pocket and fired into the man’s gut.

He went down and I stepped fully into the house.  And that’s when I saw it.  The book was there on the table.  And sitting on top of it was … a teacup.  Some inconsiderate, uneducated moron had put a fucking teacup on top of a comic book!

That’s when the rest of his family came running.  His wife and kids all began to flock to the front hallway to see what the noise was all about and I was standing there over their father and husband, gun still in hand, staring at the ruined comic.

The man lay on the floor, clutching his gut and struggling to speak.  “¡Correr! ¡Salvaos!”  I don’t know what he was saying, I was still too dumbfounded.

I knocked the offending cup to the floor where it spilled it contents and shattered.  I picked up the book and was heartbroken to see the cup had left a very visible ring of brown.

“You ruined it!” I yelled.  But what could I do, leave it?  I’d come all this way, had shot a man for it.  I was breaking one of my only rules about collecting by stealing the book, but that was his fault.  I had offered much more than he’d paid for it, he was just being unreasonable.  He had forced my hand, so of course I couldn’t leave without taking it with me.

But first I had to deal with his family.  His wife stood there crying at the sight of her dying husband.  She raised her fists and ran at me, screaming, so, on instinct, I shot her too.  I wouldn’t shoot the kids.  There were three of them all crying and looking up at me, terrified.

They didn’t know any better, and maybe with such an unreasonable father out of the way they could grow up with a better sense of how the world operates.  I did them a favor.

I tucked the gun away, held firm to the book, and ran.  I sped back to the point of origin, activated the portal, and sent myself back to 2040, the only physical copy ever reported of BALLYHOP firmly in hand, but careful not to roll or crease it.

As I slid back through the timestream to 2040, I just staring at that cover.  No, I was staring at the cup ring.  That stupid, damnable teacup had ruined my book.  And, granted, being in the hands of a kid that age in 1932, it wasn’t a mint condition book without the ring.  But dammit, still!  It would go in the collection, obviously, but I knew I would always be on the lookout for another copy.  I’d consider this my reader copy, then, but the hunt continued.  For collectors like me, it never ends.

FROM THE BOOK “642 THINGS TO WRITE ABOUT”:

Write a scene in which a woman is fired after only a week on the job.  Just a week earlier, the same person who is now firing her was very persuasive in convincing her to take the job.

Lila entered Amy’s office and said, “Hey.”

Amy looked up from her computer screen for a second and returned the greeting, then said, “Have a seat, please.”

Lila skirted around the chair in front of Amy’s desk and sat down, feeling like she had in ninth grade when Vince told her he was going to set off an M-80 in the bathroom.  She’d never heard the BOOM, but when Principal Skinner called her into the office, she had noticed the item sitting on his desk and tried very hard not to react, desperate to convince the man she knew nothing about it.  She quickly scanned Amy’s desk for anything that shouldn’t be there.

Amy finished whatever she was doing with a final keystroke, then turned to Lila and said, “How are you doing?”

Lila shrugged and said, “I was doing just fine.  Is something wrong?”

Amy shook her head and said, “No, nothing’s wrong, really.  It’s just … we’re gonna have to let you go.  I’m sorry.”

“Um, what?” Lila asked, shock lodged in her throat like a rock.  “Why?”

“We’ve had reports you’ve been sleeping on the job.”

“No, I haven’t!” Lila said more emphatically than she’d meant to.  “Who said that?”

“That’s all confidential, but it’s from a reliable source and, I’m sorry, but you were told at orientation that sleeping on the job was grounds for termination.”

“Except I haven’t been sleeping on the job!” Lila insisted.  “I want to know who the hell said I was!”

“Look,” Amy said, steepling her fingers on the desk in front of her, her face all concern and heartbreak, “I don’t like this any more than you do.  You’ve only been here a week—”

“Because you convinced me to take this job,” Lila added.

“Right.  So I hate even more having to be the one to do this, but my hands are tied.”  She held her clasped hands up off the desk as if Lila was expected to see the invisible ropes binding them.  “I need you to clean out your locker and someone will walk you out to your car.”

“This is bullshit!” Lila said.  “Amy, I wasn’t sleeping!  What the fuck is going on here?”

“I’m gonna ask you not to use that kind of language.  Please gather your things and go.”

“That kind of language?  You just fired me for something I didn’t fucking do, of course I’m gonna use that kind of language because this is bullshit.  I think I deserve to know who said I was sleeping and I’d like them to say it to my face!”

“And I wish I could give out that information, I think you’re owed it.  But I can’t.  We promise everyone who comes to us anonymity.”

“Fine.  Then I saw someone sleeping on the job, too.  When I came in here, you were zonked out in your chair, head back and drooling.  Who do I go to with that?”

“We both know that isn’t true, Lila,” Amy said, sitting up straight in her chair, probably to indicate she was wide awake and alert.

“Neither is this,” Lila yelled.  “I wasn’t fucking sleeping on the job!”

At Lila’s raised voice, the door opened and one of the security guards entered, asking, “Everything ok in here?”

“Everything’s fine,” Amy said.  “Could you escort Lila to the lockers so she can get her things, then out to her car, please?”

The guard nodded and held the door for Lila.  Lila looked back at Amy, the woman who was solely responsible for her taking this job only a week ago.  She shook her head and said again, “This is bullshit.  I hope this place burns down.”  Then she walked out.

As Lila was leaving, Greg Ayers, one of the other supervisors in Amy’s department, entered.  The door closed behind him, and he asked Amy, “How was it?”

“Did you not hear it?” Amy asked.

“Yeah, sounded rough.”

“But it’s done,” Amy said.

“So why did you hire her if you were just gonna make up a reason to get rid of her?” Greg asked.

“Power,” Amy said.  “I heard Hitchcock used to fire someone right away from his movie sets, just to show he was in charge.  Every so often, I like to bring someone in, give em a few days, then fire them.  Keeps everyone else in line.”

“So, she wasn’t sleeping?”

“Nah,” Amy said, waving away the very idea.  “She was awesome.  But she wasn’t in the union yet, so no grievances.  Try to fire one of those motherfuckers, even if they WERE sleeping, and you’ve got a battle on your hands.  No, this’ll do.  Word will get round, the worker bees will shape up, those who need shaping up, and all will be right.”

“That’s some cold shit,” Greg said.  “Well, it’s time for lunch.  See ya.”

“See ya,” Amy said.  Greg closed the door behind him as he went.

(EXCERPTED FROM THE MOST RECENT C. DENNIS MOORE NEWSLETTER, WHICH YOU CAN SUBSCRIBE TO HERE!)

Since I’ve done literally nothing productive for the past month except make new covers and re-publish old stories I took down years ago—a worthwhile endeavor, for sure, but it’s not writing  new words, and since I fancy myself a WRITER, writing is kind of an important part of that—I decided I had to do something, anything, to get back in the swing.
 
So I do what I always do and I made a plan.  This plan took the form of a specific daily writing schedule:
 
Sunday: Newsletter day
 
Monday: Update day.  This week I fixed the cover for THE NIGHTMARE CORRIDOR (I never liked how close the THE was to the NIGHTMARE, so I moved it up just a bit), updated the bio information and republished it.
 
Tuesday: CDM SSW day.  This week, after having taken another look at THE NIGHTMARE CORRIDOR and remembering just how much I like that story, I sent it out to the C. Dennis Moore Short Story Webring subscribers.
 
Wednesday: Invasion Agents day.  I’m still waiting on Sweetpea to do the cover.  She’s only one week into her new house and spent the week putting her office together, so, fingers crossed.  Meanwhile, I got started on Issue 14.  It was only 305 words Wednesday after work, but it’s 305 words I didn’t have before and, if I’d had more time, I could easily have kept going with another few hundred.  It was a rough start at first, but once I got going and knew where I was headed, I fell into it pretty easily.
 
Thursday: Writing day (new).  This is the day I’ll work on new words for whatever the, technically, next project will be, in this case, after “President’s Day” and “Invasion Agents #13”, THE THIRD FLOOR 2.  I did 800 words that day, with the effects of the second shot just starting to set in.  I could have done more, I think, but vacation days are a busy thing these days.
 
My vacation day schedules usually look like this:
8:00 Kara goes to work.
9:00 I take sweetpea to work (this week was 8:30, then I went to the courthouse to pay the taxes on my car)
10:00 I pick up Frankie (the part of Clementine will now be played by Frankie) from work.
12:00 I pick up Sweetpea from work and we have lunch together (this week after lunch, I bought Kara a birthday present), then I come home and write until Kara gets home.  So most of those vacation days off, I’m working in 90-minute intervals, and this week I only managed 800 words, but it was 800 words on a book I haven’t touched in about 2 years, so I’m not complaining too much.
 
Friday: Writing day (old).  This is the day I take something that’s already written but for some reason just not ready, or something I have on my “you’ve done so much work on this, you really need to finish it” list.  This week it was reading through “The Organ Grinder”, which used to be this not really very good X-Files script I wrote back in 1996, longhand, in the back of a car as I rode to work each night when I worked in Kansas City with some other St. Joe guys I knew.  A few years ago, I started rewriting it as an Angel Hill story about a team of paranormal investigators, but I never could quite grasp the story.  Having read it again Friday, after not looking at it for almost as long as it’s been since I touched THE THIRD FLOOR 2, I think it’s pretty good.  The writing itself, the narrative, is in some places at a level I didn’t know I could write at, and as far as I can tell, I only need to find a name for the monster, make a tweak here and there, and I think it’ll be ready to go out into the world.  And that was while feeling like complete shit.  Seriously, if you haven’t got the second shot yet, clear your schedule for at least 2 days afterward.
 
Saturday: “Admin” day.  This is the day I’ll take care of the “boring” side of the writing business, the non-writing part, where I organize files, work on marketing and getting reviews, etc.  This week, I took everything down.  I unpublished everything from Smashwords (with the exception of “PINK JELLYBUG MINK”, a collection of 5 or 6 poems in the “Pink Jellybug Mink” series of poems, and CUNT, a short story that is only available on Smashwords), Draft2Digital, Nook, and Kobo.
 
So for now, Amazon is the only place to get all of my titles.  Why?  A few reasons, the first being it’s just going to make tax time less of a pain in the ass, and that is a good thing for me.  Honestly, I was making so little from D2D and Smashwords that it didn’t make it worth my time to even file the taxes from those places.  We’re talking $11.66 from Barnes and Noble (Nook) last year, and I think maybe like $38 or so from Smashwords.  I didn’t make a TON from Amazon last year, but if I’m going to have my stuff anywhere it’s going to be the most popular and the one I made the most from, that one will be worth my time to mess with the taxes each year.
 
Another reason is I want to put this stuff back on KDP Select, which will make Prime members able to borrow the books for free, but, if they read them, I still get paid.
 
Also, being in Select allows you 5 “Free” days every 90 days.  So for 5 days of your choosing, they don’t even have to be in a row; you could do Monday one week, Tuesday the next and so on for 5 weeks, or however you want, but you get to make your title free for 5 days.
 
Currently, I think only “Carlotta Valdez” and “In the Presence of Loneliness” are in Select.  Speaking of which, starting tomorrow, Monday the 9^th, “Carlotta Valdez” will be free all week, Monday through Friday.  If you don’t have it, this will be the time to get it.  Obviously, all I ask is that you leave a review, because I cannot stress enough how important reviews are to authors.  It’s not an ego things, it’s an Amazon thing.  The more and better your reviews, the more likely your book is to turn up in those Amazon sales emails we all get, recommending books we might like.  My novel THE THIRD FLOOR showed up in one of those one night while I was at work, when I still had a second part-time job at night, and by the time I got home, I had sold 600 copies just in those few hours.
 
So, seriously guys, reviews.  If you read it and it’s on Amazon, PLEASE leave a review.  They don’t have to be the 1000-word reviews I often write, just a few lines will do, and you’ll be my new favorite person.  Hell, I have a few readers, David Taylor and Roger Fauble, who’ve left so many reviews so consistently, I don’t know if they’ll ever have to pay for another C. Dennis Moore book, because I know by giving them a review copy, they will definitely leave a review.  Thanks, guys, you two are fucking awesome.
 
Also on Saturday, I finally got “President’s Day” up on ACX so I can get the audiobook version in production.  I really wanted a female reader since the main character is a woman, but of the few I’ve worked with in the past, two of them I wasn’t thrilled with what they did, one I loved, but she never replied to my offer, and I want to avoid putting it up for random auditions; the turnout for those is so little sometimes, and I love this story so much, I really don’t want to have to settle for whatever I can get.  So instead, I offered it to another reader David Bain and I have worked with in the past, someone whose work I’ve admired, Quintin Allen.  He replied last night that he’s recovering from surgery and has another job or two in line first, but if I can wait a few months, he’d love to do it.  That’s a relief.  Obviously since the book came out months ago and I’m just now getting around to worrying about the audiobook, I’m not in THAT big a rush, so I think I can give him whatever time he needs.
 
So that is my current writing schedule:
 
Sunday: Newsletter
Monday: Update
Tuesday: CDM SSW
Wednesday: Invasion Agents
Thursday: Writing (new)
Friday: Writing (old)
Saturday: Admin
 
It won’t stay like this forever, obviously.  Only working on a novel one day a week is not going to get it written, but I definitely needed some sort of structure to get me back into the habit of WRITING, but also allowed me time and space to get some of this other stuff worked on, too.  I still have, according to my list, 40 titles that need to be updated with the new bio, 9 of which are still unpublished and need new covers (actually, several of them NEED new covers, but only 9 of them aren’t currently available).
 
So a schedule is good and for this week it felt great to be doing something besides just updating old stuff from 9 years ago.  I will absolutely have to work on my word counts, though.  300 words?  I applaud the effort, but holy fuck is that weak.
 
Oh, shit, I almost forgot, while we were out Thursday, I also finally got Kara’s ring size and ordered her engagement ring.