Write a story where a character goes back one year in time.

     He died.   A time machine materialized in the living room eleven months after he was gone.  She came in to find it glowing and vibrating.  

 "Step in," she heard it say.

    Just like Ebenezer Scrooge she was transported in time to before her boyfriend died last year.  He was sitting so contentedly at his desk.  But he was dead drunk.  He didn't notice the change in the vibrations in the room.  She knew he could not see her but she could see him.

    She wanted to scare him and shock some sense into his thick head.  But how to leave a message for him from the future?  She knew that anything that a time machine traveler did on a visit to the past could alter the future that they experienced when they got back.  She tried to think of something small that she could do that would wake him up to the consequences of his drinking and still not destroy the future that she had built after his death.

     If he had faith that there were spirits in the afterlife who loved and cared about what happens to us in this world perhaps he might change his drinking habits.  However she could not come up with a way to leave him a message without altering the life that she had in the future.  She was secretly glad that he had died.  His bills would have been monumental and he probably would have been in jail for the DUI.  She would have been stuck for the three hundred a month bail payment that he required to get him out of jail before he died.  

   His death provided closure and a new chance for a good life for her.  She silently pushed the return button on the time machine and got out in her living room.  The machine dematerialized and she was home safe and unchanged.