Out of Time (Flash Fiction)

The incessant humming, would it ever stop? She felt vibrations travel through her body like chop on a wind beaten lake. As time passed, anxiety rose. Was something wrong? She wondered, “Should the event last this long?” What if the humming ripped her apart? She fought for consciousness.

Anna’s day began with an omen that would have shaken someone less scientific than herself. Driving to work, she ran over a squirrel in front of children walking to school. Upon entering her lab, the dean of the department of applied physics met her at the door to inform her that her project was canceled for the coming fiscal year.

The news wasn’t unexpected, just the timing. She had been rushing through her work on the tesseract for the last few months. She knew the time was running out; time that really didn’t exist in the first place. She needed the lab to complete her work on the dimensional gate and prove her theory.

Now, she floated in blackness, all sensation gone. She questioned whether she had blinked out of existence and this was all that was left. Maybe she was caught in a dimensional limbo.

Suddenly a burst of light brighter than anything thing she had ever encountered enveloped her. It struck through all of her tissue at once like a thousand shards of glass. The light eased and everything around her faded into view just like an old Polaroid picture from her youth. First there were outlines of trees, a steeple, and then color soaked into the flowers and pavement. Unbelievable!

She looked upon on the village that was her home until she left high school. Anna was so sure she’d never return, but here she was back in Alaska and there she was… a girl of five years old.