By Christopher Fryer
*
Jill woke up with the sun in the early morning glow. At first everything was normal, but that normalcy ended as soon as she went to stretch and get out of bed, and found that the comforter had frozen stiff. It took all her strength to push it off her, and she leaned the blanket against the wall like a sheet of plywood, its ruffles and frayed stitches as solid as dry paper mâché. When she looked back at her bed, she saw that her pillow had paused with an everlasting indentation of her head. More shocking still, her boyfriend, Nick, was motionless as a wax doll.
“Nick!” she screamed, trying to shake him. But he wouldn’t move, and she could not wake him. He looked peaceful, at least. His mouth stuck in a dreamy smile. She couldn’t hear him breathing, and with her ear against his chest, Jill listened for a heartbeat, but heard nothing of the sort. No gurgle, no sigh, no sign of life at all.
Soon Jill realized that this stationary state applied not only to her Nick, but more. She looked out her window at the streets below to see that all the world had come to a stop. A pigeon stared blankly straight ahead, frozen mid-flight between her building and the next. Clouds rested like watercolor images in the sky, the backdrop for a passenger jet, stuck there, defying gravity and time.
“Time,” she echoed, touching her throat.
It felt so strange to speak. The air was thick and it took extra work to force words out of her lungs, like exhaling chalk dust. The air had a particular metallic taste to it that she’d never noticed before.
She did not want to cry, though a tear or two broke through. She wiped them away and kept her cool, then decided to leave the room.
She forced on some clothes, though it took a lot of effort. Everything gave such strong resistance. Even her bedroom door took a mighty tug, leaving her sweaty and heaving on the floor. She tried to lift the cellphone from off the kitchen counter, but it was as if it were super-glued down, and the buttons hardly budged, so it took a lot of patience to dial the police. It was no use, the phone wouldn’t ring, the technology was useless. Everything had frozen still, from the air to her boyfriend to all modern electronic devices.
Again she tried to wake Nick from his permanent slumber, but she could hardly ruffle his hardened hair, let alone get his eardrums to vibrate. Was he still alive? She couldn’t tell, and with no clue what else to do, she left the apartment to look for help.
Outside, the world was but a photograph, a snapshot trapped in time. Jill took the stairs down to the street and waded through the silent city, surrounded by immobile life-size puppets, their masters having abandoned their strings. Time had stopped, just as she’d wished, only this wasn’t quite what she’d meant.
People were paused while crossing the street, driving their cars, tying their shoes, or chewing their food. A man on a bicycle had pulled the funniest face in the moment before striking a parked car, but without time the moment never came. A cute couple was about to hold hands, their fingers millimeters apart. A cat was leaping from a fence. An old woman dropped her purse—it floated there, like some illusion, halfway from her hands to the earth.
She went to work, mostly out of habit. Her coworker was pouring a latte, nestled there behind the espresso machine, and the milk between pitcher and cup was stiff as an icicle, as was each and every drip. There was something beautiful in the pause, the way Jill could see all the little details in things. She’d never looked so intently at a person’s face when they performed such mundane tasks as this. When time moved so quickly, people hardly ever looked at the details of each moment. How could they, when they went by so fast?
“This is my fault,” she said, though she didn’t like the blame. It certainly wasn’t the first time she wished to manipulate the clock. Nick was leaving for grad school in three weeks and every night she dreamt their time together would last forever. “I asked for this. I wanted this. I wanted time to stop.”
“That’s right,” said a voice from somewhere close behind her. “Are you glad with what you got?”
Jill faced the voice, but there was nothing there.
“Who said that?”
“I did,” it said, ahead of her, but somehow out of sight.
“Who are you?”
“I’m the tick and I’m the tock. I’m known as Time, my dear, the clicking of the clock.”
The voice came from nowhere. It was not a thing or person, it was only a voice, and maybe it was only in her head, though there was no one else around to ask if they’d heard it.
“Have a seat,” said Time. “Please let me explain.”
Jill sat in a nearby chair at a table next to some lady stuck mid-sneeze, and if Jill wanted to she could’ve counted every little drop of saliva in the spray.
“You wished last night for time to stop, you felt it slipping by. I understood your plea because I hear it all the time. You’re born, you age, you live and then you die. There is no way to stop it, no matter how hard that you try. It doesn’t seem fair, that things always have to change. You like the way it is now, you want things to stay the same. Trust me, Jill, I’ve been hearing these complaints, but I’m afraid you’ll never understand until you see it from my way.
Just look around at what you see, the world is put on hold. No time, no movement, no anything, only this permanent frozen mold. The sun will never set, the day will never end, you’ll never kiss your boyfriend, he’ll never move again. This isn’t what you wanted, this isn’t what you meant, but if time were suddenly to stop, this is what you’d get.
Time is a construct, yes, I’ll agree with you on that, but though you made the explanation, the idea is still a fact. Things cannot move or operate without a working rhythm, there is an order to this chaos, a pattern, a momentum. See, all of this, you and Earth, the future and the past, you’re grains of sand inside the universe, a giant hourglass. I’ve flipped you over many times, to watch the sands switch sides, and once the bottom fills, I’ll reverse it, to see what the sands devise. This might be my favorite version, the humans are a treat, but you should have seen what came before, it would knock you off your feet.
So though you wish for time to stop or perhaps for it to slow, I’m afraid that isn’t possible, that’s not the way things go.
The universe is an hourglass, as I said before, momentum pulls sand top to bottom, creating some new form. You’re a single grain with a very important feat; you play a role with the rest of the sand to make the universe complete. No grain can pause or change their path, or all will come to cease, each grain must land wherever they land, this is what makes each grain unique. Existence is an infinite ride. You’re recycled energy. You’ve been around for billions of years, your story’s incomplete. If time were to stop now, we’d never know what came next, the universe needs movement and momentum in order to exist. All would be still, from your heart to the stars, and to be honest with you, Jill, that’s just not in the cards.
Be happy that you live. Be happy that you die. You’ll rejoin the other grains, and all will be all right. Time will keep on going, without you or those you know, it never stops, there’s always change, in the ebb and in the flow. Soon enough I’ll flip the hourglass, and you’ll get another shot, in some new wild universe, you’ll find your special spot. You’ll be a bird, an asteroid, a freckle on a queen… You never know what’s next, but imagine what you’ve seen. I could tell you all that’s come before, but it would take forever, and since I’m about to unfreeze time, I’ll save that talk for later. Before you go, I must insist, take advantage of your time. Cherish the now and just relax, everything will be fine.”
Jill woke up in her bed, well rested and content. She hugged her boyfriend, who hugged her back.
“You were talking in your sleep,” he said.
“What about?”
“It was mostly gibberish. But whatever it was, it rhymed.”
She’d never remember that moment, it happened in a flash, but on those days when she felt upset that life was moving by too fast, she’d conjure up an image of an hourglass, and somehow, inexplicably, that helped her to relax.
THE END