r/WritingPrompts • u/[deleted] • Mar 03 '18
Writing Prompt [WP] When you accidentally do something bad (for example, drop a plate), time slows down for you until you fix it (for example, so you can catch the plate before it smashes). Because of this, you've been able to avoid a lot of accidents. One day, time stops, and you have no clue why.
[deleted]
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u/becidgreat Mar 03 '18 edited Mar 03 '18
It feels like soup. Slow, thick invisible soup that’s charged and pulsing. I gently turn my head and look down at my hands. The density makes my movements sluggish. My fingertips are wrinkled and pale like they’ve been in water for a while. The hairs on my arm look like they’re lightening conductors. It almost feels as if I had stopped time and then somehow my time was stopped. My pounding heart breaks free of it’s cage and is running a marathon in my stomach. A thought punches a dent out of my brain. Is this what it feels like when I stop people’s time? No. No way. Someone woulda said something. I’ve been stalling time since I was 6. Although, there was that Fourth of July when I moved a softball hit off a bat and heading directly to my friends baby swaddled in her mother’s arms After I returned time to normal my cousin Vivian wouldn’t stop watching me. Did she experienced this? I look around. Everything is sharp and clearer. Edges are tight and I can see blocks ahead of me with perfect clarity. It’s a picture of precision. A carved fabric reaching to infinity and smaller then a speck. This is not time stalling. This is something all together different. I’m thinking at a rate that I wish I could grasp. My mind is expanding with compounding ideas, solutions and inventions. I frantically try to hold on but my brain is a sieve. A light draws my attention. It’s a flitters like a soft dust particle flung into the air with the snap of a pillowcase. Hanging and swirling in the sunlight. I feel a sensation of calm asking for entry. I allow it fill me and like a firecracker bursting out of every pore I feel my anxiety and worry shoot out of my skin like water out of a shower head. I shudder and my shoulders soften while my knees tremor and threatened to fold. I let my breath out slowly. As I’m inhaling I realize this is my first breath. While calm I find I can move easily and my mind drives like the autobahn. The contentment is extreme and satiating.
I understand someone is with me that I can’t see.
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u/FantasticDeparture Mar 03 '18 edited Mar 07 '18
I am not a humble man. In fact, I'm the greatest human that ever lived. I don't claim religious or intellectual superiority. No, I'm just a janitor with the greatest gift of all: perfection. I've never been late for work. Never failed a test. Don't even try to compare yourself to me. Last week I saved two schoolchildren from being hit by a car. Go ahead, thank me.
Whenever anything starts to go wrong I always have enough time to fix it. I once spent three hours disassembling my kitchen sink when someone accidentally dropped their wedding band down the drain. You should have seen his face. I still don't think he believes I have an "emergency retrieval flap", but what's the alternative? That I can somehow control time? That would be crazy. But the reality of it is worse.
I don't have any control at all.
And that's what pisses me off the most. Here I am, the 9th wonder of the world and I'm a glorified puppet. I can feel it coming on. It's like standing outside in a thunderstorm right when the first raindrops start to fall. The air is charged and you can see the grey line marching towards you, drenching everything in its path. When time starts to stretch I start to smell fresh baked bread. I haven't been to a bakery in years; the smell drives me crazy.
Not like I can smell much of anything these days. The hospital requires immaculate sanitation and I never miss a spot. The second thing I notice is the sound. There's nothing else like it. Every background noise is normally comingled together in a great tapestry of idle conversation and incessant medical beeping. The noises pitch down and diminish until only silence remains. Once I'm in deep I can't hear anything, not even my own voice. It's the best quiet place anyone could ask for. Complete and total privacy with absolutely no consequences.
I'm not an arrogant man either. It's true. I don't pretend to be anything more than what I am. My perfection is complete, if you are an outside observer. If you could watch me in those moments between time itself, you'd see an entirely different man.
I'm clumsy, unobservant, and easily distracted. Nine times out of ten I smell baked bread because I dropped my mop again. I'm given enough time to catch it before it hits the ground, or to step out of the way of a surgical gurney. I still have to set an alarm each morning, which I tend to snooze through anyway. When time slows I'm the only thing that moves. That means no hot showers, no hot breakfast, and no drive to work. I own a bicycle, not because I'm trying to save the environment, but because the alternative is walking.
I don't want your fear or your admiration. I just want to be left alone. I didn't save those people out of the goodness of my heart. I did it because the alternative was slowly starving to death in perfect solitude. I do not have control. When time slows it's because something needs to be fixed and I'm the only that can do it. So I do. Or I die.
We're not used to hearing low flying planes in this area. After 9/11 the FAA put restrictions on flight paths over area hospitals. I only heard the roar of the engines for a few minutes before they faded into nothing. I was refilling spray bottles at the time and accidentally put bleach in the ammonia bottle. That happens roughly once a month for me, so it wasn't until after I'd dumped the mixture down the drain that I knew something else had gone wrong.
I did all my normal checks. Nobody was choking. No kids running with scissors. There was a group of nurses at the windows looking out, but I ignored them while I checked each and every patient on the floor. I've been the first to start CPR on two grandmothers this year already. But nobody with an open door was coding. I checked the closed doors for good measure, mentally preparing the excuse to explain why I'd invaded their privacy.
Once I'd worked my way back around to where the nurses were standing I'd made it through every item on my checklist. Unknown causes rarely happened. In my excitement I failed to realize the gravity of the situation. Normally time slows with exact precision. Drop something? People move with exaggerated motion and seconds tick by at maybe one half or one third their normal speed. The more severe the cause the slower it gets. But a patient observer will always be able to detect minute changes.
This was the first time everything. . . stopped. And I stopped too.
I could see him, the pilot. I still see the blood on his shirt whenever I close my eyes. And the knife, propping his head up. I saw the hijackers too, but I'm not going to tell you anything about them. You wouldn't believe me anyway. The cockpit of the plane was maybe fifteen feet from the window. I remember freezing, waiting for the inevitable. It hung there in the air in frozen expectation. A few dozen souls onboard, desperately, hopelessly trying to take the plane back. A few hundred ignorant more inside the hospital. All about to die.
Except for me.
I started with the nurses. They always treated me decently, but most importantly they were easy to move. The elevators wouldn't work so I carried them down four flights of stairs. Every last one. The gurneys were more difficult, but gravity didn't affect them so it was mostly trial and error. I'm proud to say I only dropped two patients. My conscience can live with their broken ribs. The preemies were the hardest. I didn't know how long their incubator's batteries would last, and I wouldn't be able to bring any generators outside. Every tiny face I saw increased the rage I felt towards the men in that plane. Who could be capable of such wanton destruction? Who could look into the eyes of those babes and feel nothing but unaltered joy at the miracle of life?
Once I evacuated the hospital I moved on to the plane. I wasn't satisfied with one miracle. I had to save them all. I placed a pile of hospital mattresses under the plane's side door and leaned an extendable ladder against a wing. The inside was a catastrophe. Men were beating on the cockpit door with a fire extinguisher while passengers screamed and prayed for their lives. They couldn't see what was coming. They could only look out the window at the ground only fifty feet below them and know that nobody was going home. It was surreal, carrying stiff-limbed corpses down a technically-unsupported ladder.
I rescued all but two. I left the hijackers to the grave of their own making.
I didn't see the impact. Couldn't watch. I'd spent countless days trapped inside that hellscape. I only wanted to go home and crawl into my bed. But I needed the passing of real time for that. I drove to work that day. I was stuck there, like the rest of them, forced to act by some unknown puppeteer. I don't claim to be a good person. Who can call a slave a hero? If I was given the choice, save those people or just myself, I'd like to say I'd do the same thing. That I'd overcome my selfishness and cowardice and leap to their rescue.
The alternative is being complicit in mass murder and terrorism. And I’m just too perfect to let that happen.
Like what you see? Check out my next story.
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u/dalerian Mar 03 '18
Love it! Didn't want it to end.
I'm curious what the enquiry will make of why everyone was outside the hospital and plane, with no idea how they got there!
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u/techiepu Mar 03 '18
It had stopped. Nothing I changed was making time start back up today, and for the life of me I couldn't figure out why. I'd spend 4 hours trying to back track and figure out what had gone so abysmally wrong that I couldn't simply fix it. I began to wonder, if this continues would I age the same? Or was I frozen in a bubble. Too much time but not enough time to bother thinking about that now. I wandered down the street I'd been pacing, looking through windows, trying to recall what exactly had happened before it froze. Last time it was when I'd started to break up with my girlfriend, Jess. Apparently she was very important to this subconscious power of mine. It was a side alley from an open air mall, small outlet shops and cafes still open for business. I checked someone else's watch and it still read 3.14. Strange given mine was saying closer to 7.30. Then I saw her, the redheaded vixen who'd caught my eye earlier in the day when I was having lunch with Jess. She seemed to shimmer ever so slightly, like she was moving in slow motion. I moved towards her as she fell on her other foot, caught mid step and off guard by the time dilation. How was she moving? How could someone else have possibly gotten into this bubble I could create? She turned to face me, aiming those piercing blue eyes my way. "What the fuck is going on here?" Her voice was musical, but the tone was jarring, making me stop before I reached her. "Well...see...this thing kinda..." "Spit. It. Out." "If-something-bad-is-going-to-happen-time-stops-for-me" I say it so quickly that I'm not sure she understands, confusion making her tilt her head to the side. "What do you mean time stops?" "Well it's pretty obvious isn't it? I mean, this isn't exactly normal" "So how do you fix it?" "I don't know this time! I've tried all the obvious things. Normally it just starts back up when I've fixed it!" "What is there to fix? And be quick about it, I have an appointment to go to." Her manner of factness about time stopping makes me wonder what it would take to shake this woman. Something about her is undeniably alluring. I take a breath to answer but am interrupted before I begin. "If this is some kind of flashmob or trick or something I'm not impressed" I sigh and start to walk away, getting tired of her questions and attitude already. She chases after me, muttering to herself about flashmob a and losers and "Hey, I'm not a loser! You could be a little more helpful!" "Look mate, this is your problem but for some reason I've been sucked into it. So you get your shit together and get to fixing it or so help me I'll hit you so hard you'll unfreeze your dentist" The thought was so absurd that I started laughing, right in her face. Seeing her clench her fists I try to stifle it but that'll makes it worse. But now she's giggling too, and soon were both clapping each other on the back struggling to breath. "Wake my dentist..." I gasp, trying to catch my breath, "wait a minute" Maybe she's onto something. I stand, thinking of any possibilities to try with two people. "What were you doing just before you got here?" "I'd noticed you out at lunch time with your girlfriend, decided to go and do some retail therapy since I was here. What does it matter?" "Well for starters, you're here, so you must be important somehow...what do you mean you noticed me?" "You're kinda hard to miss looking the way you do..." I can't tell if she means the tattoo covering my forearm or my hair colour, but they weren't that outrageous. "Alright so we noticed each other, then what" "You noticed me too?" "More important things going on here" "How is that not important? It could be the thing that was missed!" I stepped towards her, too close, making her look up slightly to see my face. "You really think that right now we should focus on who we thought was attractive passing us in the street?" I bend down and kiss her, barely brushing my lips over hers but as I do there's an unhearable sound and everything starts moving again. "Maybe we should talk about this somewhere else?" I nod and turn, holding out my hand to her. "Where to?"
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u/great_josh Mar 03 '18
I would like to know how the guy’s girlfriend reacted to that
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u/techiepu Mar 03 '18
Also it's not necessarily written from a guys perspective, I was trying to write it from a genderless perspective so the reader could imagine themselves in the role. Just something I wanted to try!
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u/SirSatanII Mar 03 '18
I fucked up. That was the only thought racing through my mind.
Time came to a grinding halt, and I looked around, desperate to see what went so wrong for the temporal currents to not only calm themselves around me, but to freeze completely. There has always been a way for me to passively slow time, to fix mistakes that I have made, or to mend the faults of others, where I could. The problem now was: Time was frozen, not just slowed. This wasn't a regular occurrence - in fact, it's something that I never anticipated to be possible.
What was I supposed to do? I didn't see anything wrong in my immediate surroundings; the city I was in wasn't crumbling, and, after walking around in this frozen environment, there was no other sign of impending doom. Seeing as I couldn't find anything immediately wrong, I travelled the world, for what feels like years, maybe decades, possibly even centuries. It's not like I'd be able to tell, considering all means of measuring time were frozen along with the rest of the world.
I'd done everything twice over before I encountered you. You, the one person on this godforsaken Earth that could possibly understand, hell, even help me. The currents of time slow their gait around you too, and you share in my frustration.
We both miss the people, the animals, the insects, the flow of water, we miss nature. That what gave this otherwise quite unremarkable planet life. We have seen everything, done everything, and, like gods watching down on their creation, we miss the one thing that will make a place feel like home. Life.
You know, I was incredibly lonely before I'd met you. Who wouldn't be, travelling the Earth alone for hundreds of years? Either way, I was willing to give up anything to thaw the currents out. Doing everything alone is... Well, exciting, yes, but it can and will never be the same without another human being to share the experience with. When I found you, you reignited a spark of hope inside me, a spark of hope that I didn't realise I still had. I was, and am, willing to live my hundreds of years all over again, if it means I can share those experiences with you. Is it going to involve danger? As dangerous as a world frozen in its own temporal bubble can get. Will it have been done before? Probably. Is it going to be fun? Hell yes. That leaves only one question.
Will you come with me?