You Snap into the procedurally-generated shithole you call a hometown, and a moment later the stench leaves you gagging. So many universes and yet, in almost every one, South Topeka smells like a family of raccoons died inside a middle school locker room.
You tighten your travel bag around your shoulders, put your hands in your jacket pockets, and walk through the old neighborhood. The street signs don’t quite match your memory — Kildare Street is Mayo, here — but the strip-mall is still half-abandoned, and the meth house on the corner still lacks all its windows. You stop outside the ranch house you grew up in, more or less, and stare at the front door for a long time. The siding has warped and the roof is in rough shape. The grass is high, half-hiding nasty clumps of sticker weeds. In one universe, you knocked and strangers peered at you from behind the deadbolt, and spoke in a language you hadn’t heard in all your travels. But you’re more afraid you will know the faces inside, so you hesitate.
(By “you hesitate”, I mean I’m hesitating. We all do what we must to survive returning home. If I say you’re the one doing this, maybe I’ll believe things unfold as they must.)
Eventually you knock, because you want to get out of the reeking wind. Your brother opens the door and looks at you with such shock that you know that in this iteration you’ve not been around for a long time.
His hug is brittle. “Do you want to see mom?” he asks, but when you say yes he drives you to a cemetery. It was a mistake to come here. It always is.
--From "All the Hometowns You Can't Stay Away From," published in Fireside Magazine.