What lonesome work, this. People all around, never speaking, acknowledging, noticing, moving. Animals trapped in an instant, the world’s spin ceasing for as long as the mind held.
It hadn’t felt like this in the beginning. In the beginning it was party tricks and pranks. You remember the first time you did it on purpose it was to make your insufferable cousin eat dirt on the playground. You couldn’t make time start again, and so you panicked, until, tears streaming down your face, you remembered that the jittery time stops you had forced in the past had ceased when you resumed your original position, facing away from your cousin. You have since developed a habit of marking your footsteps.
Your younger sibling found you out. Ze asked, “So you’re a superhero now!” Stupidly enough, you agreed. Ze couldn’t stop smiling at the secret you now shared. It would have broken zir heart if you hadn’t lived up to the title.
You found the second limitation after you made a mistake.
Hero. That was what you thought you were. So you did what the movies had taught you. You walked, alone, late at night. You saw things nobody your age -nobody at any age -should see, and you stopped time and did what you could. But you saw the car heading for the dog and when you tried to save it the world stuttered, shivered, and kept going.
You gasped. Swallowed a scream. The dog lay, broken, on the pavement. A fatal tragedy, at least for the dog. But what kept you rooted to the spot, shaking, was the fear that you had lost it.
It was only fifteen minutes before your constant flickering of time turned into the real thing, but after that you were careful. You experimented.
The work that you do now is long, and lonesome. You have a watch that you keep on you, but it runs slow. You counted it out once, and you’re pretty certain that for every second the watch registers, two pass for you. And for every two seconds you experience stopped, you have to wait two seconds before switching the world on again.
You know you’ll never be able to stop time again after this. Despite the carrying and walking you have done, your muscles have never grown stronger, and you cannot remember feeling hunger. You do heal, at a much slower rate, but you don’t die. You hope and pray that all those you have moved, far outside the city, will be protected by your actions. They will only perceive a lurch and a sudden, disorienting change from crowded New York city streets to suburban sprawl. The rain that is ever just starting will begin to fall, although it will take a minute longer to reach the suburbs than where you will be. Even though you have brushed against a few drops, suspended, you haven’t truly felt rain in decades. Whenever you let yourself think about it, you hope there will be time to feel the rain falling when the world snaps back.
You hadn’t meant to stay this long. The intersection had been cleared easily enough, within a few days, but then you walked by another building with cracks rising from the ground. You took another two days for reconnaissance. Buildings everywhere were poised to unleash rubble, and some had already begun to split. New York wasn’t built for an earthquake of this magnitude, clearly.
The city has a lot of places for people to be. Dragging frozen person after frozen person individually from the city -a city of millions -you thought you would go insane. Things perked up after the first month, when you found a huge pallet with wheels.
Pulling commuters out of the subway was the second worst. Going into tunnels without light, you tripped over rats suspended in motion and tore your clothes and skin. You pried open doors and dragged body after frozen body down those tunnels. Some had already collapsed, and you dug, further and further. At first, you’d been frantic- then, when you realized it would be years of work, you took the time to go to the library. Computers were useless of course, but basic engineering texts did help. Those you dragged out would be bloody and bruised- but, for the most part, alive.
The actual worst were the people engaged in violence of varyingly intimate levels. The number of people into whose foreheads you carved their terrible crimes is too high.
You felt a pang of guilt for ignoring the pets. You took them down to street level when you remembered, but it was already hell going up sixty flights to drag human after human out from their crumbling office building or apartment, let alone their furry friends.
It took another two years after you had pulled everybody out to complete a sweep of the city. You found a homeless man under a stack of cardboard, a baby in a locked room, and a pair of lovers locked in an embrace, well-hidden from their workmates, and on and on. You used to bring blankets, re-drape fabric, but at this point you just don’t care.
Nobody. You are as certain as you’ll ever be. Nobody is about to be crushed by falling bricks and concrete. You look at your watch -it gives a date 99 years and 9 months past what the news scrolling on the billboard above you tells you it was. Two hundred years. You have found the fastest ways out of the city. You have come to know every bodega, corner store and basketball court in the damn city. You pray you’ll have time to use the knowledge.
You step into place and look up at the falling wall of concrete, and prepare to run as it begins to fall.
Reading Cactus 