Buried in Sand
Charlie let the temporal freeze come instantly. The slowing of time was instinctual now. He'd had months in the sanitarium to perfect it. He flipped it on like a light switch as soon as he heard the gunshot.
The gun was pointed at Meaghan. Had he not slowed time, the bullet would've already entered her torso. As it was, he could see the bullet hanging in midair.
Meaghan was more than just a nurse, she was a gift from the outside. She brought light and normalcy into the sanitarium's stale environment. Smiling, lovely, and un-patronizing; Charlie was smitten the first day she'd said hello.
"Hey, Chuck. What a great breakfast this morning, right? I assume you've taken your meds already."
She assumed the best of him. How cool was that? And she called him Chuck. She just had to believe him, even if no one else did.
"You know the Doc will be upset if you skip them again."
The doctor was just like everyone at school. No one had believed him. Not even his advisor. Didn't it matter that he'd earned a full scholarship for temporal physics? Didn't his overwhelming test scores buy some credibility?
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"You were brought into this program to make new discoveries about time and space," his advisor snapped. "Not waste your genius on impossible theories. You simply cannot stop time as you've described. You would contradict proven laws of nature."
The mistake Charlie made that day was to assert that he could stop time. Weeks after he'd been moved to the sanitarium he realized that he wasn't stopping time at all, he was only slowing it down. Or at least he was observing it pass infinitesimally slowly. Did that mean he was speeding up? He wasn't sure. All he knew was that he could observe time pass so slowly it was nearly impossible to detect. The bullet fired at Meaghan seemed frozen in place, though Charlie knew it moved ever closer along its trajectory.
He couldn't understand why Meaghan had ever dated Jake.
"Leave me and you'll regret it!" Jake threatened one night. Charlie heard him yelling in the parking lot. Meaghan was crying.
"Thanks, Chuck, but don't worry about it," she said the next day. "It's best for you not to get stressed. Jake won't be back."
Yet there he was. In the sanitarium. Firing a weapon at the only person who believed him.
He'd told her before how everything worked. She listened without skepticism.
"Do you have super speed?" she asked. "Can you grab bullets out of the air like Neo?"
"I know that's how it always happens in the movies, but I'm not like Neo. I can't do stuff in the blink of an eye. All I can do is observe time pass and try to move a little bit faster than that. It's exhausting, actually. Like trying to move your arms when you're buried in sand."
"What good is it then?" Charlie couldn't answer that question. "Sounds lonely, Chuck."
Meaghan didn't know how right she was. Charlie might not be able to stop this bullet from hitting her. But for however long he could, he would let it hang there. Keeping her alive. Straining for movement.
The End
This story was first published on Wednesday, April 1st, 2015
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