Upper Limit

Life always stuttered, far back as she could recall. It started slow—maybe one second frozen for every five minutes. As a baby, her voice would slice off mid-giggle, and her parents hadn’t noticed the extra day older she’d grown that first year.

And it sped—by the time she was six, one second in every minute failed to move the world forward. At eight, when it had quadrupled rate, she looked more like a ten-year-old. The doctors told her parents she’d just matured quickly, but by then she knew better.

She started spending ten percent of her seconds in limbo. She used her moments outside the flow of time to watch the frozen expressions on her friends. They didn’t know there could be space in between their own thoughts, that the clock’s pendulum could stick midswing.

And the tempo kept picking up. She decided one morning to run from home, but she crashed her father’s car into ever-halting traffic. She crawled out of the wreck and walked down one road after another. In the tenth year of her life, her fourteen-year-old body could take the punishment of wandering.

She found the temple around the time half her life was liminal. Some of the men there were so unstuck from time that they would grow beards in front of her eyes. She watched one woman develop laugh lines in an eyeblink. They were the only people she ever met who still moved when her time stuttered.

Is there any way to stop it? She asked. And she meant, How long do I have?

Be grateful you don’t have the inverse, came the reply, and she looked to the nursery full of sleeping children. Some of them are more than two centuries old.

She marveled at the changes, but she couldn’t help wondering if anyone could control it. At least in the temple, she couldn’t sense time passing in the same way. Not as many things froze for her. These days, she guessed she spent three seconds out of every four in limbo.

She wondered if any of them ever got to 100%, and she got more answers the farther she descended, able to talk to more and more of the shifters. It seemed to work asymptotically, and she was slowing down now, reaching critical mass. Some people burned out like flames in front of her, and she knew that was how she looked to the young ones.

Go back into the world, one of the older women told her. See how fragile it all is.

So she did, and she was the same age as her parents who didn’t even notice her presence, slow as they were. She hid from them every three minutes, when the real second would tick by. She watched their suspended bodies in the interlude, left her fingerprints frozen in their skin. She wondered if she should write a note, but the ink from the pen would take the rest of her days to leave its marks on paper.

She left them, explored the world in still life. She walked across rivers. She snuck into houses to watch paintings of families. She yearned for time to freeze completely, so she could get a snapshot of the whole world in one tiny moment.

Still, their lives ticked by every few days. She didn’t have to worry about being seen. People created ghost stories out of her passing phantom, but she was a hundred miles away by the time they thought to tell them.

When, one day, she lay down in some back alley’s back alley, she wondered if her corpse would flicker.