The Memphis Gambit

I did not fall because I was high.

Win Lockhart has published the Memphis Gambit, a free weekly nobody takes seriously, for twenty-eight years. Then he falls down the back stairs of his own building, and the framed cover on his office wall changes while he is holding it.

Burger King is Kingburger now. Krystal burgers are round. A football ticket says Alabama, and everyone who ever knew the man who owns it swears he pulled for Tennessee. Online, a few thousand people call it the Mandela effect and argue about cartoon bears. A handful of strangers keep a careful list of what has really changed. A few of them still have the things that haven't.

Some of them stop posting.

Win does what a newspaperman does. He prints a quiz, calls the readers who get it right, and runs the story down. It leads to a warehouse on Lamar Avenue, a white rental truck that is never late, and a pleasant man in a quarter-zip who has read every column Win ever wrote and has been standing at the edge of Win's photographs for twenty-two years.

Somebody is rewriting the world one small thing at a time. They keep a schedule. Win is on it.

The Memphis Gambit is a time-bending mystery set in the bars, back alleys and Thursday-morning newspaper boxes of Memphis, Tennessee, and in a well-lit city that has never had a night. It is about the things we keep, the people who keep them with us, and what it costs to remember a world nobody else does.

It was all a very long time ago. Win means to find out who decided that.

For readers of Blake Crouch's Dark Matter and Stephen King's 11/22/63