Time

Time is a question, tick tock, tick tock. Each hand of the clock moving, thump, steel clanging, moving, every second, moving in a pattern. The question is where does it all go? To what avail do the hands tick? They end up in the same place. Every sixty clicks of the longer hands, every twenty four of the small one. Locked in an eternal cycle of repetition. Never ending, ceaseless. Eyes following the tireless hands. Every hand an indifferent tick. Rust pervading the air, time having made the clocks oxidize. A sense of mortality hanging over the air aged every hundred milliseconds. The air was rough.

It was night, and the apartment building was locked down. The city center was dead, asleep. The clock in the tower across from it was chiming. The chiming ended, everything happened at the same time. From all directions. From the east, there was an explosion, lights went out. From the west, a fire was drifting, roaring, raging faster and faster towards the city center, lightning struck a pole behind the building. Screaming and shouting from all sides. A mighty groan and the clock tower gave way. The wind chiming, whishing, screaming as the building fell forward with a mighty thud. Stone upturning, uprooted. It was as if the cosmic die had rolled multiple sevens.

When it was all over, nothing stood standing, stones crumbled over, sprinkled over what was once a mighty, bustling city. Concrete weeping as it held the corpses. Fire glowering, no more to eat, illuminating the crimson pools that made puddles all around. The smell hung heavy in the air, fuels burning, remains of carbon from creatures long gone.

Time kept passing, even though the hands had become motionless.

Things kept living, even though time had passed from the annals of existence, into the void.

The only thing that remained standing was a tree. A tree that the people of the city had recently passed a law to cut down. A tree that remained standing when the city had fallen to ash. In that moment, did it matter the city had taken subjective seconds to burn? In that moment, did it matter that the people burning had felt like ages were passing? Time is an illusion, a construct.

Two seconds is a long time in the space of human conversation, two seconds is an eternity when you are burning. Two seconds is the blink of an eye in moments of peacetime.

Many centuries later, the standing tree would fall down, and out would come a cane. A cane that would support a man who had made his way out of the city, spent lifetimes in two wars, who was now delusional, had Alzheimers, his head had spots on it, his eyes twinkling, sharp as ever, even in delusion. His leg had stopped working, trees did not remain on this earth, until his son, an adventurer had found this one in the dystopian world of crumbled places. Time passed on. Time had never breathed a second in her life.