Tick-Tock Time Machine

When Sam's uncle gives him a home-made clock for his birthday, he’s disappointed it’s not a surfboard.

The next morning, Sam wakes up to find the clock gone. Then his uncle turns up, just as he did the day before, with the exact same birthday present...

I've always wanted to write a time machine story, and I had a ball with this one. I grew up hearing a story my dad told me about people who travel back billions of years to a time before the dinosaurs were around. The people step on a butterfly by accident and when they go back to their own time, everyone’s speaking a different language because of the flow-on effect of the death of that one butterfly. So my story was really just a simple leap of cheekiness to make the trip back in time mess-up something else in the ‘future’...

I like the way this story became more than just a time travel story with a twist – at the end, even though the time machine no longer exists, it still changed the main character’s future because of the impact the experience had on him.