Fat to the Future

Screenplay draft

Randy shuffled through the hay-strewn barn on the edge of Hill Valley, his puffy vest zipped to the chin and his shoulder-mounted camcorder already rolling. The machine weighed twenty pounds and dug into his collarbone, but he kept the red REC light burning because every stupid thing that happened to him felt like it might vanish if he didn’t tape it. Tonight the tape was supposed to capture the test of Doc Harlan’s latest contraption: a dented silver DeLorean parked between two milking stalls, its gull-wing doors wired to a lightning rod that stabbed through the roof. Green ecto-energy already seeped from the wheel wells in lazy ribbons, smelling like hot pennies and wet straw.

Doc Harlan, zipped into a bright yellow jumpsuit that glowed against the gloom, tightened the final clamp on the flux capacitor and shouted for Randy to get in. The first bolt hit at 9:47. The barn filled with blinding white and the car screamed forward, tires kicking up hay and manure. When the light faded, the DeLorean sat empty in the same spot, but the town outside had changed. Billboards that once read “Re-elect Mayor Tannen—Law and Order” now showed Tannen’s face with a thicker mustache and the slogan “Tannen Family Values Since 1985.” Randy’s parents, Carol and Frank, no longer existed in the living world; their kitchen chairs were stacked in the attic, their names scrubbed from every mailbox.

Randy filmed the empty driveway, then filmed himself filming it. The camcorder’s viewfinder showed static laced with the same green ecto mist that now leaked from the DeLorean’s seams. Doc Harlan dragged him back into the car and they jumped again, this time landing in a foggy 1955 where the same billboards advertised Tannen’s first run for office and the barn was still a barn. Carol and Frank flickered at the edges of the frame like bad reception. Every time Randy tried to warn his teenage mother not to marry the wrong man, the ecto leaks triggered fresh slapstick: a ladder collapsed under Doc’s feet, sending him into a trough of pig slop; Randy’s vest caught on the DeLorean’s spoiler and yanked him into a stack of hay bales that exploded like confetti. Each disaster rewrote another detail—Frank’s job at the diner vanished, Carol’s favorite song changed key, the family station wagon turned into a hearse.

By the third jump the town square had become a permanent traffic circle of contradictions. Tannen’s billboards multiplied, each one larger and more corrupt, while ecto ribbons curled around lampposts and made pedestrians trip in synchronized waves. Randy’s camcorder battery died mid-rant; he swapped it for the spare taped to his vest and kept shooting because stopping felt like surrender. Doc Harlan calculated they had one final lightning strike before the timeline hardened into permanent nonsense. They parked the DeLorean on the courthouse roof, ran jumper cables to the clock tower, and waited. Randy’s parents appeared on the sidewalk below, translucent, arguing about a picnic that had never happened. When the bolt struck, the green energy surged through the cables and into the car, but the overload also ignited the hay bales Doc had used as insulation. Flaming clumps rained onto the street, scattering the fading figures of Carol and Frank.

Randy dove from the roof into the open gull-wing door, camcorder still braced on his shoulder. The DeLorean fishtailed through the fog, ecto light painting the billboards in stuttering green after-images. At the exact second the clock tower bell rang, the car punched through its own exhaust trail and landed back in the original barn. The hay was unburned. The DeLorean’s doors creaked open on their own. Randy stepped out, vest scorched, camcorder still rolling. On the tape, Carol and Frank stood in the kitchen doorway arguing about dinner, solid again, the station wagon parked in the drive. The final frame caught Randy’s own face reflected in the viewfinder, cheeks flushed, the green mist finally cleared, and the battered sports car settling into the straw with a soft, ordinary hiss.