Moment

BY DR. AGONSON

“I love you,” I whispered in her ear. Then I paused time. All around us, the thrashing tentacles of the monster froze, captured within a moment. That was my power, to hold onto a single moment of time for as long as I needed. I hope she heard; it was the only goodbye I’d get.

They never knew, you see, what my power was. I’d pause time, start it again, and they’d be none the wiser. The clocks would move again, and only I’d know that they’d stopped.

Hundreds of portals, like bloody cysts, poured out their viscus, clear pus. They were all too small, or filled up by the slimy green tentacles coming out of them. You could still see the other world through them, a world of maddening angles and incongruous shapes. It must be Hell, I thought, gazing through these strange windows.

As I passed one portal after the other, I smiled. The monster was writhing. Here, in the reality of our world, time had stopped. In this world, he couldn’t move, was trapped, but he wasn’t all in this world; halfway between ours and his, halfway within this frozen second and halfway out of it. I watched as its tentacles tore free of its body, sheared as it tried to escape, sheared by the thousands of portals it had used to cut into our world.

I found a doorway that was big enough. No tentacles filled it; below, it opened onto the creature’s waiting mouth. Rows of jagged barbs lined what appeared to be a depthless chasm with walls of flesh. It was huge, large enough to fly a plane through, large enough for a building to fall into it.

I reached my hand into the void. It was cold, it was thick—like glass somehow—and it had time. I felt the time within that world. I tried to grab a moment there, but it grabbed me. I felt the coarse, razor-like pricks of a tentacle piercing the flesh of my forearm. It dragged me through the heavy, glasslike portal and toward that waiting mouth.

Quickly, before falling into the void, I willed the clocks of my world forward again, commanding them to continue the rhythm of life once more, to continue once I was gone. Then I fell. There was no air in this new world; it was all fluid, heavy and oppressive. My lungs and chest collapsed under its pressure. But there was time here, even in this alien place time had dominion, and I, dominion over time.

It dragged me into its world, but only for a moment. I could not live here; I could not breathe. Death was only a moment away, and then I’d fall into that chasm below. But I could hold onto a moment; I could make a moment last forever. I stopped the creature’s world, freezing the liquid glass of that strange, irreverent place of devouring hunger. I stopped time beyond the portals, and captured the beast in its lair.

All around the world, men watched as the strange portals shrank, severing the millions of tentacles from their source. Like headless snakes they writhed and finally died. The heroes of earth were praised for whatever miracle they had worked. They had defeated the devourer foretold; the same creature which had razed the surface of long forgotten Mars was stopped by the caped heroes of the wonderfully blue and green earth.

Only she knew, though she didn’t know. She only heard him, and then watched in wonder as she and her world were saved. When she turned around, he was gone. Surrounding her, the monster lay dying, pieces of its corpse littering the entire world. Yet, of him there was only a fainting moment left, the soft memory of his whispered, “I love you.”