Z

A small-town newspaperman shelters a naked couple who materialize in a park during a storm; they claim to be Summer and Wyn Storm but suffer puzzling gaps in memory. As the man houses them, their uncanny physical resemblance and unpredictable changes, such as variations in hair length, hint at a deeper anomaly. Over years he watches their lives intertwine with his, and scientific speculation about time reversal gradually gives way to a personal revelation: one of the pair reports that an explosion and a reversal of his time direction caused him to become both his own parent and child. The story examines identity, causality, and paradoxes of self-creation.