It always did this. Time after time and time after time. Well, it was time. That was problem really. Dr Karz Flembold took his hand out of his pocket and poked it out of the temporal bubble; he saw a second immediately tick past on the clock face of his Casio.
He whipped his hand back in, feeling the sting of the present like a burn on the skin of his fingers. The watch immediately froze again. 15:04:21. It always was. But yet, he knew, time was still there. He had seen the world around him crumble and fall away,...
everything flows
Time lay scattered everywhere. In the depths of the forest he could hear the 1700s exploring; somewhere to his left there were the ancient druids.
everything is meant to flow
The watches had stopped. All of them. Then again, everything was happening all at once, and there is only so much that clockwork can stand. Mechanisms are man-made and they can be broken, just as man can.
time is meant to flow
He was aware that this couldn't last - not that there was really a concept of lasting now (not a meaningful one, anyway). The universe would...
She didn't look at him.
He didn't look at her. They had an understanding. The only way to succeed was if they didn't show the mark that everyone in the room was absolute strangers.
Glasses clinked, the lounge pianist droned his snooty song, polite ladies left to powder their noses, and she stood directly under the chandelier's magnificent crown. In a few seconds, the lights would fizzle out, he would pull the cord, and she would lie dead, crushed by the weight of the crystals and copper.
Or they would make it. They would make it to the mark, take...
Once, in Beijing, a young girl in a red gown huddled in a doorway. But was pushed away, rudely by a tall man. He walked in, I had seen him before. Years younger. The features were still the same. He walked straight for me, not hesitating. Called to me: "Jacob.". The voice too was familiar but different somehow. His eyes were my father's, the nose too. But it was not him, nor was it my brother.
He talked fast: "I have to prove something."
I didn't know how to reply, I couldn't place him. That face, I felt if I...
The clock had stopped.
The clock had stopped at two minutes past eleven, but whether that was eleven this morning, last night, or three weeks ago, he wasn't sure. He rarely looked at the clock - it was just something that was there, on the wall, taking up space. Something that he would, no doubt, miss were it ever to be gone, but, because of the sameness of it, because of the reliability of its general shape being where it always was, it went unnoticed.
It was only the fly that was buzzing annoyingly around the room that caused him,...