This Fractured World

Time is a strange companion, especially when what you believe to be the inevitable feels just out of reach. You’ve spent your life measuring minutes in promises and plans: morning coffee with the sun just a pale promise on the horizon, meetings that bled into lunch, then lunch that slipped into the hum of evening errands. Time was a scaffold, a steady partner in all your schemes. You thought you understood its rhythm—tick, tock, the steady beat of certainty. But that was before the whispers began.

In the beginning, the changes were subtle. You might have noticed it while sitting at your desk, pointer finger tapping on the polished surface of your clock. An entire hour glanced away while you checked a text; a few precious minutes abandoned you during a morning commute. You complained, of course. How could time feel so eager to flee when you longed for it to pause? You blamed it on stress, on sleepless nights that lead to hallucinations, and on the guilty pleasure of daydreams. You had no idea those missing minutes were settling like dry tinder, awaiting a single spark.

On the eve the world began its slow twist, you sat in your favourite armchair at home, absently tracing cracks in the wooden floorboards. Though everything looked normal. The lampshade unchanged, the familiar pattern of your rug. But the air tasted different, as if each inhalation drew in something unspeakable. You shrugged off the disquiet and reached for the novel lying next to you, determined to lose yourself in fiction. You opened the cover, glanced at the time on the digital clock atop the fireplace mantel—7:13 p.m.—and then… you blinked.

When your eyes snapped open, the room was darker. The clock read 9:02 p.m., and the house had fallen silent. No hum of the refrigerator, no ticking of the thermostat. You frowned, rising to your feet. How had forty-nine minutes simply dissolved? You felt a tremor of anxiety, a hollow thump in your chest. Certain it must be a malfunction, you walked over and tapped the glass face of the clock. It did not tick. The display wavered, then froze. Time had let you down once again, but tonight it felt more deliberate. A warning. You did not know exactly why, but a shadow of dread fluttered in your chest, as though some ancient instinct, buried beneath layers of routine, was sounding its alarm.

Morning arrived with a reluctance that grated on your nerves. The sun struggled through thick cloud—gloomy tendrils that seemed to seep into the city’s frame. You poured coffee and watched the filtered light smear across your kitchen table, staining the parchment of your day ahead. You felt off-kilter: a sense that the world had shifted slightly on its axis, enough that your old certainties no longer fit. You chalked it up to overthinking, muttered about “bad energy” in the universe. Yet when you turned on the news to drown out your uneasy mind, the anchor’s voice faltered behind a grim photo: an isolated incident in a rural town several states away. Farmers had found dozens of animals dead without explanation. Some had bite marks, others rigor mortis setting oddly early. Reporters were vague, doctors said it was “under investigation,” and the screen cut to a commercial for a phone company boasting “fast connections.” You couldn’t shake the tension that rippled through your veins, as though a racing heartbeat could smash the glass separating you from the unseen.

The following day, rumours swirled. Social media exploded with rumours of people behaving strangely. People walking without direction, skin pallid as paper, eyes void of recognition. Videos circulated of cherry-red stains around mouths and vacant stares. Most of it was dismissed as a hoax, a prank, or sensationalist fearmongering. You scrolled past the images, fingers hovering over your phone, heart thrumming like a frantic creature desperate to break free. You clicked away. You told yourself it was nonsense.

But the more you tried to bury it, the more time unravelled. Something was seeping into the fringes of your reality. You found yourself gripping your watch, staring at the second hand flicking forward, willing it to march steadily, demanding it to slow down. One afternoon, you sat in a café and ordered a latte. The barista’s eyes were hollow, iris pale beneath the flickering overhead lights. She moved with a jerky grace, placing your coffee on the counter. You heard her breathing but felt no warmth in her gaze. You excused yourself as if propelled by an invisible force, leaving behind the cup—still hot, still steaming, but abandoned. When you glanced back a moment later, she was gone, and the coffee lay untouched. You never went back to that café.

With each unsettling moment, time both taunted and comforted you. You woke before dawn, pacing your living room, calculating time itself. if it’s twenty-eight days of incubation, as some doctor said in a late-night broadcast, then the window of security still lingers. You immerse yourself in calendars, bolded and crossed-out dates, convinced that if you can predict the future, you can outrun it. Yet every time you turn from the planner on your desk, the flurry of scribbled lines seems to blur, as though some unseen current is wiping away your carefully erected safeguards. You try to catch a glimpse of tomorrow, but tomorrow slithers beyond your grasp, disappearing like smoke in your lungs.

You go about your small routines. The dishes, laundry, emails, each task a defiant gesture that the world is unchanged. But beneath your insistence, something fundamental shifts. The days fold into one another like origami cranes, fragile and easily crushed. You glance in the mirror, noting how your eyes look tired, too large for the narrow confines of your skull, haunted by the things you’ve seen online. The rumours that began as a trickle but now cascade through the internet like a toxic flood. You remember how, last week, you stood in the grocery aisle, watching shelves go empty as people stockpiled canned beans and bottled water. At first it felt like a temporary panic, a glitch in civilization’s veneer. Now you know better.

An unseen clock ticks in the distance, each tock an echo that resonates in your bones. You try to anchor yourself in moments of beauty—the way the afternoon light presses gold through the windows, how the lilac scent floats from a neighbour's garden. But these moments grow fleeting. Time, once your ally, has betrayed you. Each moment of calm feels like a lie, a prelude to the storm. You imagine standing at the edge of a cliff, toes curled around loose stones, peering down at a valley of shadow. One misstep, and gravity will claim you. That cliff is time itself and your sure footing is slipping.

Still, you cling to hope, even as it thins. You think of loved ones: a sister with a laugh that could crack ice, a childhood friend whose smile reached her eyes, the dog you once carried across a backyard fence when he was just a puppy. You hold onto those memories like life rafts, praying that tomorrow won’t obliterate them. You wonder if – when the unthinkable breaks free – you’ll remember them with the same clarity. Will you recall your mother’s voice, or will it blur into the static of loss?

Night approaches, and with it the relentless drumbeat of your heart in a city that teeters on the brink. Somewhere, beyond the glow of streetlights, a dog barks. It's sharp, urgent almost, as though warning you of something that has already begun. You tense, listening to the silence that follows, the heavy hush before the storm. You flick on one lamp, then another, until the room is bathed in yellow. Light feels like a shield, but you know it’s fragile. It only delays the coming dark.

In these final hours before normalcy falls, time becomes your only truth and your worst traitor. It hums beneath your skin, a reminder that each second you waste staring at the walls could be the moment that marks the end of innocence. And so you pace, flipping through the channels, half-expecting the news to finally say what you’ve been expecting, or perhaps what you’ve been dreading. You long for confirmation, to brace yourself for the collapse you feel looming. Still, nothing. Just the dull glow of televisions tuned to static, or talking heads veiled in calm words that feel unconvincing.

And yet, even as you brace for the worst, you can feel that the world you’ve known is perched on the precipice. It stands there, unaware of the fault forming in its foundation, ready to crack open at a single, devastating tremor. The ticking clock lingers, each tick a portent: the time you have left is shrinking, but whether you can outrun what’s coming is a question with no answer. In this suspended moment where dread and hope dance in cruel tandem, you realize that time is both your curse and your salvation. For as long as the seconds click by, there remains potential: a potential for love, for loss, and for the reckoning that waits just beyond the horizon.

Tonight, you linger in the doorframe of the old world, staring into the encroaching gloom. All around you, trivialities—books on shelves, cutlery in drawers, photographs of laughter—cling to the false promise of permanence. Yet you know the truth: time will not wait. The soft whispers that ride the wind, the empty gaps in conversation when neighbours pass each other on the sidewalk, the headlines of odd illnesses fizzing with ominous possibility—all form a tapestry of quiet terror. The fall of all things is not a single moment but a slow unravelling thread being tugged at with each minute you spend pretending it isn’t coming.

Still, you breathe. You walk to the window and peer into the night. The city lights flicker like a constellation of anxious stars. You grip the windowsill and let time wash over your hands. The faint hum beneath your skin that reminds you you’re alive. And in that narrow window between heartbeats, you understand: when the world shifts and everything you love turns to dust, all that remains is time itself. It is eternal, impartial, and cruel. Yet it is also the only thing that can carry you past the threshold of oblivion. So tonight, you sit in its company, waiting, knowing that with the first crack of dawn, nothing will ever be the same.