Time is, Time is Not

1

Time is

Too Slow for those who Wait,

Too Swift for those who Fear,

Too Long for those who Grieve,

Too Short for those who Rejoice;

But for those who Love,

Time is not.

-Henry Van Dyke

Alex could control time.

No, that wasn't quite right.

Time decided to bend the rules for Alex. Not all the time, just when it was in a listening sort of mood or if Alex was being especially loud. And time didn't always follow the same rules, it was wobbly at best and unstable at worst.

Time also never really stopped for Alex, it just stopped around her. Which was infuriating because Alex found she would much rather stop and watch the world, instead of the world stopping to watch her. It was the difference of hitting fast-forward on a DVD and hitting pause. Hitting fast forward meant watching a two hour movie in only a few minutes, hitting pause and then going to do something else meant the movie was going to be there when she got back, all two hours of it.

Alex couldn't stop time for herself, couldn't stop herself from aging, or skip forward to the future where no one knew her name or face or stealing habits. But, she could do a lot of other fun things.

Like stopping traffic.

Driving was one of Alex's favorite past times. Actually, stealing cars was one of Alex's favorite past times, driving them was her second favorite, especially when the car was expensive and fast (preferably painted black).

Driving behind or with people who were texting was Alex's least favorite past time.

Case in point, a large really loud blue Dodge truck three cars in front of her on the highway. For the last five minutes she'd been watching the truck cruise in the far left lane, he was passing and going fast, which was fine, what wasn't fine was the fact that he was swerving in his lane, sometimes hitting the rumble strip, sometimes driving on the white line between his and the middle lane. He was causing traffic to slow down because people were afraid to get to close out of fear of potentially being hit or driven out of their lane.

This annoyed Alex immensely because she was in a stolen Ferrari and wanted to go fast, and also because she hated people who texted while they drove. Alex had many faults, but texting and driving was not one of them.

She watched the blue truck straddle the white line again before jerking back into its own lane and then she smacked her steering wheel with the base of her palm and cursed loudly.

That's when time went wobbly.

It never took Alex long to figure out when time stopped around her, apart from the rather obvious side effect of everything freezing and the sudden lack of noise, the tips of her fingers also always felt fuzzy, like they were on the verge of falling asleep. Sometimes her ears popped too, as though the pressure was changing in the air, but that wasn't as common a side effect.

Alex dropped her hands from the steering wheel of the now frozen Ferrari. The speedometer was stuck on eighty. She popped the door open and swung her legs out from under the steering wheel. Leaving the door open she strolled down the shoulder of the highway, kicking at pebbles and pieces of rubber leftover from shredded tractor trailer tires. She stuffed her hands in her pockets and watched the pieces of rubber bounce a couple of feet before settling on the hot pavement again.