Short Stories

Time

I developed the ability to stop time by the time I was ten.

It certainly made my life easier. I could cheat on assignments by peeking at other worksheets, I could run away from home to calm down whenever my parents were fighting again, I could even steal candy bars from convenience stores without the cameras noticing. Light can only show you what it can touch, and if you're moving faster than time, the light can't touch you, so nothing (people or otherwise) could see me.

It wasn't all perfect, of course. Students who had been bullying me for years began to notice how I was suddenly able to avoid things like being attacked with spit balls or buckets of water being poured on me from the roof. They got more creative, and I had to work out how to keep them from figuring out that it might as well have been magic and not pure luck.

When I was nineteen, I moved away from my tiny little hometown and went to go start college in New York. Money for tuition or residence wasn't a problem, as I could literally just steal wallets completely undetected. I kept cash for personal things and credit cards for more pricey things when my own actual job failed to support me.

I never did quite work out what it was, just that I could now freeze time and look at things in a way no one else could. When time is frozen, of course you could do things like graffiti stuff behind the cops' backs, but I took the time to appreciate things like how the skyline looks from the top of my apartment building. Especially when the sun met the line of city buildings. I'd spend what I can only assume were hours staring at the orange fading into the pink that turned into purple that changed into blue. It was lovely and silent, and it made for a good reading spot.

One day, I had hopped over to a part of lower Manhattan I'd never seen before, time frozen as it was whenever I felt the need to get up and wander.

It was all going fairly well when I saw a shadow flicker across the ground.

Now, remember that time is frozen. I can't move anything other than my clothes or whatever I was already touching, or else it breaks. I'm moving faster than time, so if I touch anything It'll shatter or break or die because there's no time for it to resist or push back like the way a cement wall has resistance to a hammer. Nothing but me can move. Even if somebody else existed with this power, isn't it synced up to whoever froze everything? If I froze time, then anybody else who had the ability would be frozen like everything else unless they froze time at the exact same time I did. And it couldn't be a mirror or a window reflecting me. Same with cameras, I'm moving too fast for the light to bounce off me and show that I'm there. Even my own shadow doesn't move from the spot it was at until I unfreeze reality.

I stood there for a moment, thinking about all of this, before I looked up.

And then I wished I'd never gained this power, for as I looked up, I saw something I wish I never did.

It was a shadow.

I'm assuming the shadow of its feet were what I saw flicker by before I noticed the majority of the monster. The rest of it looked like a giant silhouette as big as Godzilla, and taller than the One World Trade Center, which was the tallest building there. The sun was setting in the west when I froze time, making the shadow press back against the world behind it, but there was nothing casting it.

Nothing I could see anyway.

It drifted away towards the sun, taking big, lumbering, silent steps.

To this day, I'm terrified whenever I stop time, it'll see me.

To this day, I'm sure it's true form was something too terrible for my mind to comprehend.

To this day, I have so many unanswered questions. And I'm not sure if I want those questions to be answered.

To this day, I still haven't seen it again.