stop

INSPIRATION

❝Face up, untouched

Gazing at the ceiling

Craving for some feeling

Game's up, we're nowhere to be found❞

⸺ Easier, Mansionair

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01

The first time he stopped the time was when he turned eleven, right before his father's fist struck him.

His father's scream was suddenly cut off, like someone had snipped out the recording tape. And then there was only silence, rushing in to fill the gaps, and him bracing against the wall, trembling and waiting, waiting, waiting.

One, two, three seconds went by. The hit never come.

Four, five, six seconds.

His held breath finally unraveled into little pants and wheezes. Slowly he gathered enough courage to peek out from behind the crook of his elbows. His father, a great hairy man loomed above him, winded back like a bear about to pounce, his big, red nose flared in anger.

The little boy stared as the world around him appeared in greater clarity. He wasn't sure what happened, only everything was clearer, sharper, saturated and bright. He uncurled and shakily inhaled, glancing wide-eyed at his surrounding as though he was seeing it for the first time.

Because, in a way, he was. The little dust particles rendered frozen on the strip patch of light filtered through the tiny window, while father's distinguished cigarette smoke suspended in their air, mid-dissipating. The car screeches on the street below stopped.

He tentatively crawled away. Inch by inch.

His father remained still. Nothing was moving. Nothing but him.

He unlocked the front door and escaped down the reeked apartment hall. His little feet pounded on the cold floor as he ran. He clutched his chest, his hands pressed against his mouth to prevent a sob from escaping. As he ran faster, farther away from his house—from father—the silent, unmoving cars and pedestrians slowly stirred.

And then everything bled back to life—the world resumed blurring and speeding past him.

That was the first time he stopped time, and it was the beginning—or, the end.

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02

Every time he stopped time, an equal amount of time was taken off his lifeline.

He wasn't sure how he knew that. Only he could feel it in his bones—a distant ache in his marrows as he practiced freezing time. The more frequent he tried to tamper the time flow, the weaker and more fragile his body became. For the first few months, the blowbacks reduced him to a walking corpse. Blackouts, accompanied with constant dizziness, nausea, anorexia and sleep deprived.

However, by the time he was thirteen, he had mastered the art. Stopping time became as easy as flicking his wrist, no longer required extensive concentration. Time, to him now, appeared as a rush of colourful threads intertwined and weaved off the distance. The whole world was a masterpiece.

He just needed to reach out and pulled a section of the tightly weaved patch in front of him, and the whole area around him would freeze for as long as he mentally kept his finger on the patch.

His father knew something was off, due to the amount of time he abruptly disappeared from the man's eyes. He had said nothing when his father yelled at him, grabbed him and pushed him against the wall. He said nothing, waited until the first hit fractured his skull. Then he stopped the time and slipped away and loped around the city in an aimless pattern.

At one point, his father had reverted to verbal abuse, which was as painful and violent as his physical beating. And unlike the physical, drunken abuse, he couldn't slip out without raising suspicious, because his father delivered the worst insult when he was sober.

Sometimes, he would hang out at the park near his home. Just watching the traffic.

Other times, he would play with the strings of time and wondered if he could find his father's thread and cut it short.

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03

Each object in the world had a particular strand. If he concentrated as he pinched the threads and let the magical power rushed through him, time-lapse scenes would project behind his eyelids. He could see the bristle of the grass blades as they bursted through the soft soil and welcomed the sun and slowly collapsed onto itself as the time drew to a close.

The hard part was to separate them out. If he identified the wrong thread, instead of snipping out the green grass, you'd collapse a building to dust. He must also be careful while removing the thread, because it tied to many others, and usually pulled on one meant he would also pull on the others, and the fine silk work he started with became a snarling mess in his lap. Fingers must be nimble and quick, painstakingly pressed down and tugged, coaxing out, slowly.

He didn't need the whole string, just isolated a section that he wanted to cut.

Once he got the part he needed, he would need to twist the thread counter-clockwise and tied a knot.

And then, he would sat and watch the remaining of the thread—the part that was supposed to come after whatever point he had chosen to cut off—turned gray and faded into ash.

He destroyed many things during these practices: a park, a school building, a few hundred street lights, cars. The list goes on. He discovered that the blowbacks would be lessened if he had a placeholder. For example, if he wanted to get rid of a supermarket, he had to find the thread of a grass field and extended it to in place of the supermarket's lifeline, then weaved it into the patch where the supermarket was supposed to be. Once that was done, the supermarket shimmered out of existence, smoothly wiped out of everybody's memories, and he would only be hit with an urge to puke his gut out.

It took him more than thirty thousand hours and blackouts to finally understood all the mechanisms of cutting off a lifetime.

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04

He stood in front of his father's snoring figure and snipped out the man's lifeline.

Blinked. And the man vanished.

He stared at the already-cold spot and the rummaged sheets. As he slowly stalked through the rooms and the narrow hallway of his house, all that remained was blankness of a college boy who lived alone.

Strangely, he felt sorrowful at the loss of a man he loathed.

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05

They called him Chronus—the Greek God of time—a fitting name for a faceless criminal that seemed to know how to manipulate the time and get away with his killings and robbing. Others nicknamed him another copycat of Robin Hood.

His anonymousity—the whitened-out face the media crazily chased and crafted after theories and fantasies—coupled with his dangerousness, made people suddenly aware how vulnerable they were. The mass death of police officers sent after him raised chill up one's spine.

People, especially the officials, whose dark deeds made them stood out on Chronus' killing list.

However, when they finally managed to catch Chronus, they were surprised to find a young man not of thirty-year-old yet.

However, the mad gleam in his eyes reflected wise and knowledge from pains and deaths and suffering.

His last words was simple: "This is the last time I can stop the time."

As sudden as his appearance, blinked and he was gone again.