“A Sound of Thunder” by Ray Bradbury. Remember it? How could one forget it? I read it during my freshman year in college. English class. At my desk. Sitting quietly in the laziness of after noon, eyes slowly galloping from left to right. Fifteen, twenty minutes and the world had vanished. I’ve read novels that didn’t startle and shake me like this one short story. Nearly twenty years later and Bradbury’s suggestions of consequence still haunt me. Good or bad? I don’t know. I do know that I’m still stricken with anxiety at times when the memory of this tale rushes to my immediate recall.

A group of men travel back in time to hunt dinosaurs. The leader of this group warns the hunters not to make any missteps while trekking through the fragile denseness of history. One careless step off the path and the future could be irrevocably altered. Insects, rodents, entire races of people could be wiped away in an instant. Languages could be throttled. Future presidents could become vagabonds. And vagabonds could become powerful tyrants.

One of the men in the story does venture away from the designated path and in doing so, steps on a butterfly. When the men return to the present time, they quickly realize that that one man’s tiny misstep had completely changed the future as they knew it.

The responsibility of it all would be too much for me. To know that I could, with one errant step, drastically change the course of history? Thank you, but no. No time travel for me. I hope no man finds himself in the possession of gift as dubious as the power to travel through time. I can only imagine that the sway of evil has a much stronger pull than that of good, and entire nations would suffer if only one man were able to figure out how to scamper across centuries.

The moral of this story creeps up on me every now and then, more frequently as I get older. Yesterday, after sitting on my back porch to skim through a magazine and drink a beer, I reentered my house and walked into my bathroom. I had been eating sunflower seeds when I was outside, so when I happened to notice a little brown speck on the front of my tee shirt in the reflection of the bathroom mirror, I imagined it was only a shell from one of the seeds. However, when I glanced down at my shirt and got a better look, I realized that shell was actually a tiny snail, no bigger than the nail on a pinkie finger. Apparently, it had been on my shirt for a while because it had left a nice, long and slimy trail down my shirt front. It was mildly disgusting.

My immediate reaction was to walk over to the commode, lift the lid and quickly tug at the end of my shirt until the snail toppled off and fell into the toilet’s bowl. I hit the lever to flush, and it was then that the suggestion of consequence came trampling forward in my mind. It may seem silly, but I wondered how much I had altered the future with that one little gesture. It could be that a gesture just as small eventually lead to the fall of the Roman Empire. Or maybe something as tiny as a snail, in the grand and complex twining of time, lead to men goosestepping down the streets in shiny boots, inhumanely gunning down their fellow man.

Then again. Maybe a snail is just a snail.

I think of things like that. And then I think that if I guage every single action I make and the consequences that are borne of such actions, I will surely go insane. So, when I think of that tiny snail, slowly descending into the darkening swirl of the commode, I have to get a grip and tell myself that it’s not as bad as I imagine. “It’s not the end of the world,” I say to myself.

Problem is, sometimes, I’m not totally convinced.