The Life Cleaner

There was once a man, named Wilfrid Briggs, who invented a "Life Cleaner"; a machine which, whenever he had an accident or made a mistake or broke something expensive like a vase, he could use to make the event unhappen.
At first he only used it for small things like whenever he spilled tea on the cream coloured carpet his wife loved so much his life cleaner would reverse time so that the tea would be temporally sucked back out of the carpet and into his teacup or whenever he forgot his wifes anniversary, he would used the life cleaner to reverse time far back enough to allow him to run out to the jewellers and buy an anniversary present.
You could say it was a vaccuum cleaner for sucking up all of lifes unfortunate spills.
The only problem was, that though it was a marvellous invention, when he had tried to market it, taking it to trade shows and different companies, no one he showed it to was interested in it because they all thought it was either some kind of scam or he was a crackpot.
But then one day he had an idea.
If he couldn't sell his invention, he thought, then he would use it to make money some other way.
So then he started to take his invention to Casino's, betting on a number on the roulette wheel; a wrong number and then losing lots of money but then using his invention to reverse time so that he could bet on the right number.
He didn't do it too often. He didn't want arouse suspicion; he looked suspicious enough carrying around the large bulky machine in his bag.
But after that their lives changed for the better.  They bought a big new house in a better part of town; started mixing with a better class of people.
Ofcourse, often his wife would start getting suspicious and worrying about where the money was coming from but whenever she tried to talk to him about it he would just use the machine to get him out of it.
Infact the machine had become a very useful tool, he'd thought, for structuring their lives.
But then he came back home one day unexpectedly and overheard his wife in bed with another man.
She was talking about him.
"My husband is always so perfect. Its almost unreal", she said, "Its like he never does anything wrong, ever and sometimes, I know this sounds mad but it feels as if he's controlling everything in our lives".
Something must have snapped inside him because then he'd gone to get the gun he kept locked in a drawer for their protection and then, going back into the bedroom he shot them both.
As he sat in a chair in their bedroom opposite the bed, crying, he kept saying to himself, "Its alright. Its alright. I'll just use the machine to suck it all back up. I'll turn back time and change it all".
And so thats what he did. He pointed the machine at the dead bodies on the bed and turned back time, sucking the blood off of the bed and his clothes; sucking the fired bullets back into the gun and the shocked, terrified expressions off of the faces of his wife and her lover and then, when the unfired gun had been sucked back into an unopened drawer, instead of shooting his adulterous wife he just went quietly out and had a coffee at the cafe round the corner from his house.
"What can I do?", he wondered, sipping coffee, "Perhaps I can turn back my life to the day I met my wife and then just not meet her".
But he didn't know wether the machine could turn time back that far.
And it wasn't her fault, he thought. Something had happened to him. Being able to control everything had turned him into some kind of monster.
Then, however, taking the machine out of his bag he pointed its nozzle at himself.
"I know what I'll do", he said, "I'll suck myself out of existence. I'll make it so that I was never born".
Unfortunately, Wilfrid had never considered what would happen if the inventor of a Time Cleaner tried to use his machine to clean away himself.
What did happen was that it created a terrible time paradox that in turn caused a looping of space and time so that Wilfrid was sucked into the machine again and again for eternity.
Well not for eternity, actually, for then, only a few minutes later, he woke up in some kind of an office opposite an old bearded man in a white suit sitting behind a desk.
"Where am I?", he asked looking around.
"The Ministry of Destiny", replied the old man.
"Destiny?", asked Wilfrid.
"Yes. Your life cleaner was a kind of an experiment", said the old man, "Normally we only give life cleaners to angels but the people in research and development wanted to see what would happen if we gave a human being control over his own destiny".
"Oh", said Wilfrid, looking saddened and ashamed, "I suppose I didn't do very well did I?".
"No", said the Minister, "But it's just like what I told them when they made the suggestion".
"What?", asked Wilfrid.
"Give a man the power to clean up his life", replied the Minister, "And he'll only use it to make a bigger mess".