Microstory 1197: Melinda Carson

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Melinda Carson loved animals, and knew that she would want to work with them one day. Unfortunately, she was born with really bad allergies, and it was looking like it wasn’t in the cards for her. She kept trying to fix this, taking all kinds of medicine she could find, and undergoing the best treatment available, but it just wasn’t doing enough. Her body rejected just about everything she tried to put inside it, including food. She didn’t technically have food allergies as well, but nothing really sit well with her, so she was kind of always physically uncomfortable. She continued to try to resolve her issues, even as the time approached when she needed to really figure out her career. Finally, she decided that, while she wouldn’t be able to realize all her dreams, she wasn’t going to let her own body beat her either. She specialized her work on reptiles and amphibians, which she had no problem with. They were just as cool as elephants and horses, so it wasn’t like she was miserable. She had to narrow her focus more than she would have liked, but there was plenty of work to be done in the field, and she always felt productive. She was content in her rather unexciting life, and never knew what other wonders the universe held. This was not the only reality in which she existed, however. Other versions of her found themselves thrown into the world of time travelers, and were regularly placed in great danger. Of course, she lived her life with no memory of timelines where different things happened to her, but she had a few strange encounters she could have been able to explain had she fully understood what alternate versions of her had gone through. People she never met—or at least never remembered meeting—on multiple occasions greeted her as if they were friends. She never did realize why, and that was probably for the best.