March Writing Competition Winner: The Girl in 2045 – Des Brown

Each month, SAIAA members are encouraged to partake in our Short Story Competition. March’s winner was Des Brown, a sci-fi author from Hermanus, Western Cape. If writing short stories and connecting with other writers sounds like something you’d love to do, but you’re not a member of SAIAA, consider joining one of our Writing Room Chapters. It’s a space for all kinds of writers, whether you’re a poet, a journaler or simply someone who enjoys putting words on the page, this space is for you. It’s free to join!

The handwritten note was waiting for me, the night I arrived.

I discovered it inside the bathroom cabinet, an hour after I unpacked. My name was on the folded cover, and to my shock, the handwriting on the inside was unmistakably mine.

Mine. The clumsy all-caps print, the slant, the annoying scribble every “S” becomes thanks to my goddamn neurodivergent tic that manifests itself whenever I write.

Avoid the girl in 2045. Whatever she says, whatever she does, do NOT speak to her. Stop being curious. Don’t ask. Just stay away, before it’s too late.

Sure, I have weird friends. No question. And they aren’t above pranking me in some seriously clever ways. But this?

2045 was the apartment right opposite mine on the second floor of the engineering staff quarters. Our wing was reserved for the South African tech team, on the eastern side of the CERN campus in Meyrin, right on the border of Switzerland and France. 

For two weeks, I watched her from a distance. Nothing remarkable. Or dangerous or creepy. Nothing I could figure out, anyway. She visited the market every day for fresh baguettes that smelled like heaven. Watered the ferns in the hallway. The CERN ferns, she said jokingly one day to me in passing.

Now, look. I can resist anything. But I can’t resist geek humour.

So I introduced myself. I remember the exact date, too: it was the day CERN made history by introducing antimatter mesons into the Quark-Gluon Plasma run. Time and matter. A project we both worked on. 

Her name was Moira. 

“The goddess of time,” she said half-seriously one evening. She made incredible coffee. Laughed at my jokes. I almost forgot about the letter. But there were hints. We loved the same books and movies. Our childhood memories were amazingly similar. One evening, out on a date, she named a fear I’d carried since adolescence.

“How could you know that?” I asked.

She smiled. “You told me. Remember?”

I should have stopped right there. Walked away. Instead, I fell insanely in love with her. And as I fell, I began to recognize the shape of it as something I’d somehow already lived. Every conversation. Every silence. Every languorous kiss, every caress.

One night in bed, she said, thoughtfully: “You wrote a letter. Before we met. Do you remember?”

I didn’t. But I understood now.

The letter wasn’t a warning about her. It was a warning from me. A letter written at the end of our relationship, after she left, and I’d be so undone that I would try to fix it by sending myself back.

She left on a Tuesday. I don’t know where she went. I only know that six months from now, I’ll sit alone in this apartment and write a letter to a man who hasn’t yet moved in, warning him to avoid the girl in 2045.

I’ll write it, knowing full well he won’t listen.

Because I didn’t either.