Saturday, April 12, 2014

Killing Time (A To Z Challenge)(250=1)

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

1. There are TWO A to Z posts, this one (a 250-word short story) and the one below, a serialized story about life, death, afterlife, and letters.

2.  FREE BOOK EVERY DAY OF APRIL! Today's free book is Just Exactly How Life Looks, a collection of short stories in the literary/magical realism genre, insofar as cowboys lost in the desert and God watching people and lions in Africa are magical and/or realistic and/or literary.  CLICK HERE to get it FREE! 

3.  I'll pay you for your writing! For some reason people submit stories to places that don't pay. WHY? If the choice is "make money" vs. "don't make money" my allegiance is clear: Pizza. Pizza has my loyalty. But you? You should check out the "We Pay For Stories" tab.

And now, your 250-word short story in which an abstract concept IS NOT. 

Killing Time




That was when she seriously began to want to kill time and put a plan into action to do that.

People don’t think of time as an actual thing that you can kill, she wrote in the notebook the police found later. Or was it earlier? Hard to say after she succeeded and time was no more, forcing people to assign sequences to things based on their own ideas and intuition.

But it is, she had written. Or: it was.  Time is (was) a dimension, and she knew that dimensions were things you could get outside, and anything you can get outside of is a thing that can be destroyed.  In the end, it was that easy: all the talk of entropy and superstrings and Godel’s ramblings were as ineffectual and intellectual as 8th-grade poetry about unicorns and love. She was able to move into fourth, fifth, sixth, even the seventh dimension using nothing more than subgrade harmonics.

The best plans are simple ones, she wrote in confession/memoir, and explained how she had gotten (would get) to the place so far outside of time that time itself looked (would look) to her how a dot looks to people existing in the usual four dimensions (us). At that point, she had simply stepped on time, ground it into nothing. Revenge accomplished, she strode off, godlike in the way she paid no attention to the havoc wreaked in dimensions beneath her notice.

Meanwhile, back home, there was no more “meanwhile.”

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In 250=1 I write short stories that are always exactly 250 words long, including the title. There's 60+ of them, and you can find links to them all by clicking here.  Alternatively, if that's too easy, find them by projecting your astral self into a realm where all things are visible and then just look around, but I'd go with the link.

8 comments:

Liz A. said...

Killing time...more like a waste of time...

"Killing time" always brings that song lyric to my mind.

So, you're telling me she became a god. Right? Because that's what a god would do, I think.

Briane said...

More or less, I think. If you have the power to move outside of what we think of as "our" dimensions and destroy some of them, that seems to qualify as a god.

I don't know the song. I'll have to go check it out.

Andrew Leon said...

I have two different of those "making time" stories in planning stages, at the moment. Maybe we should do a collection of time stories.

Robin said...

And now I am trying to imagine what it would be like if someone actually "killed" time. I suspect that the world would spin into chaos. No one could get anything done. Or be able to explain what was already done and when.

Unknown said...

That's how I think it would be, Robin. Cause and Effect would be the same thing, and you'd never know if something had happened to you or was going to happen.

Andrew: That is an AWESOME idea.

Seriously. That one writer I forget her name did a collection wherein everybody wrote about writing. We should all do a collection. Do an IWM special edition!

Vikki T said...

Just stopping by to say "Hi" from the A-Z list and wish you good luck with the rest of the challenge :) xx

Rusty Carl said...

You know what I'd really like to kill? The first dimension! I hate it sooo much. Stupid dimension. It's not even a thing!! It's just a... well, a point, except any point you can see it's a real first dimensional object. it's... well, it's just stupid.

But Time? I don't like it too much either, but I'd never want to kill it, just rough it up a bit, you know? Let it know who's boss.

Oh well, I've got to sketch something for tomorrow. I'm so mad now. Argh.

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