Time Flows

There were four of us wandering around the old house--Dave and his girlfriend, Cheryl, and me and my main squeeze, Jeanette. I'm Jace, by the way.

We'd been out hiking for the day and came across an old mansion. It looked like it had been around for two hundred years or more. Since it was still daylight and the door was half off its hinges, we decided to check the place out.

Looking back on things, people would say we were young and bat-shit crazy. But I'm telling you we were not crazy. This really happened!

The first thing we noticed as we walked inside was how new everything looked. I'd swear that people were still living there. The windows were clean, the floors swept. The fireplace had been recently cleaned and there was no dust on the paintings or tables.

Suddenly the old Grandfather clock in the hallway started to chime. Bong! ... Bong! ... Bong! ... Bo. The clock never finished; it just stopped mid-bong.

I looked at my watch. It stopped on the stroke of four. "What the ..." I started to say. "Hey guys, did you hear that?" Not hearing any answer, I turned to look at my friends.

They were frozen in place. No spark in their eyes, no rise and fall of their chests ... nothing. They looked like wax figures from Madame Tussaud's.

And then I heard it. A faint sound of tools hammering and sawing, as if from a long way off.

Looking through the door into what had been the kitchen, I saw nothing there. The hallway we had just walked through was also gone. I saw nothing but a dark gray color. Then I noticed the room in which I was standing was dissolving beginning with the clean windows and curtains, and creeping across the floor.

Frantically I looked around for some way to escape. The hammering and sawing got louder. I headed toward the sound. As I stepped through the door, my jaw dropped.

I saw fifteen or twenty small men, midgets maybe, making ... no, creating a room right over the gray mist. It was being made right before my eyes, as fast as I could sweep those eyes across the room. The entire house was dissolving and being re-made in an instant.

Then as fast as I had seen the room disappear, and re-made, it disappeared again. As the cycle repeated over and over, I began to understand.

Time is a series of instants, a moment if you will. The present passes away as that past moment dissolves into nothingness, while the next present moment is constructed for use by those in reality. It's a cycle that continues all our lives. Somehow, we had gotten stuck between those instants. How? I don't know.

Suddenly I watched as the gray mist reached out swallowing my friends before my eyes. Suddenly they reappeared right in front of me.

And I realized the true horror.

It was I, only I, stuck in place. My friends would continue to exist in time as each instant morphed into another.

I was stuck in time for eternity!

Word Count: 519 words

Prompt (from Game of Thrones): All clocks suddenly stop. What happens next?