Absence

They had all stopped, every last one. Not a hand moved, not a second was passed.
Time had completely ended. And all I could do was smile.

The kids in my class thought that it was only our clock until the principal came over the intercom saying that every clock in the school wasn’t working. That even the staff’s cell phones weren’t working. A few people in the room gasped, but I had seen this coming. Time was a wasteful thing. Our whole lives are built around it from the time you were born to the time you died. When you know of time, you waste your life doing things you think you have to do before you die.

Without time, life is infinite.


Most people think that time is a good thing. I look around at the –scared?—yes, scared faces in the classroom, and I want to laugh. Instead, I turn back to my notebook to doodle a clock with both hands pointing “up” at the twelve.





I didn’t bother drawing in the other numbers. The twelve was all that mattered, for, that was how the clock was stopped. 12:00:36 was the time when all the clocks of the world ceased to tell us how long we had to live.

12:00:36.

How, the children asked, how are we to tell what time to go somewhere?

“Idiots,” I muttered. It doesn’t matter now, I thought. We have been liberated from the worst disease that mankind has created and spread. Worse even than the Bubonic Plague. At least that took away some of the people’s misery. And most of them died without a headstone. Without time above their decaying faces.

I got up out of my seat and began to walk towards the old iron door when my teacher asked, “Where do you think you’re going? Class is still in.” He said it as if I should care.

I stopped and turned around with a smirk upon my face and asked, “How can you prove it?” His fake smile soon turned into a grimace. Without waiting for the response I knew I wouldn’t get, I put my hand on the cold door handle and pulled it down, still wearing that triumphant smile.