“You don’t know what you have until it’s gone.”

A deep thought for someone who just rolled out of bed. I stretched, scratched the back of my head, and cracked open the blinds. The sun greeted me like an overenthusiastic neighbor, blazing down on the world outside. Within seconds, the wooden floor beneath my feet warmed up, a small luxury I was still capable of enjoying.

I yawned and made my way to the kitchen, sidestepping the floating dirty dishes and half-eaten meals suspended midair like some avant-garde art installation. One of the stranger quirks of this world—things stayed exactly where I left them, even if that meant hovering inches above the countertop. Food never spoiled either, unless I was physically in contact with it long enough for the laws of nature to remember their job.

I swung open the fridge, waiting a beat for the light to flicker on. It always hesitated, as if waking from a nap. A fridge with attitude. Great. The shelves were lined with vegetables and perishables, things I never used to stockpile because they'd go bad too quickly. But now? Now they sat indefinitely in their perfect, untouched state. A silver lining in my otherwise bizarre purgatory.

“The Scramble Wrap Supreme!” I announced to no one in particular, enthusiastically swiping dishes off the counter, letting them drift behind me. I assembled my ingredients with the precision of a man with far too much time on his hands and fired up the stove. The flame ignited but, the moment I let go of the knob, it froze—suspended in time like a painting.

Still weird. Still mildly unnerving.

I had poked it once out of curiosity. Big mistake. The flame instantly reanimated and scorched my finger, reminding me why I didn’t play with fire. The burn from my first experiment still hadn't healed. Turns out, when time moves at a fraction of its normal speed, so does recovery.

Cooking required both hands—one on the stove to keep the flame alive, the other stirring the eggs. My tortilla warmed up in the corner of the pan, the final touch to my self-proclaimed breakfast masterpiece. Digging through the mess on the counter, I found my hot sauce right where I left it six sleep cycles ago, still as cold as if I had just pulled it from the fridge.

That thought lingered. Sleep cycles. I hadn’t seen the moon in... well, a long time. I had given up on measuring time in any conventional sense and instead counted my days by the simple metric of “awake” and “asleep.” It was the only way to stay sane.

I loaded up my wrap and prepared to head outside. Not for any particular reason—just because if I stayed inside any longer, I would start talking to my floating silverware.

Right before leaving, I remembered something.

“The ball!” I smacked my forehead and detoured toward my makeshift office. My computer sat on the desk, useless without the internet. If I had known this was coming, I would’ve downloaded a backlog of games. But alas, hindsight is a cruel mistress.

Floating next to a meter stick was a tiny metal ball, a quarter-inch in diameter, stolen from some forgotten machine. It was the closest object I could find to exactly one gram in weight. More importantly, I had been tracking its motion meticulously in my journal, detailing each shift with painstaking precision.

Over the past fifty sleep cycles, it had fallen one centimeter. Every morning—or what I assumed was morning—I recorded the minuscule change, double-checking my calculations against previous entries. The journal was filled with equations, scratch marks, and increasingly frustrated notes about how absurdly slow time had become.

I did some quick math. Gravity is 9.8 m/s²... time is slowed by a factor of... oh cool, ninety-six million.

I let out a dry chuckle. “Well, that’s just fantastic.”

Out of morbid curiosity, I calculated how long a full rotation of Earth would take at this rate. 263,000 years.

“Oh, joy. Eternal daylight. Just what I always wanted.” I took an aggressive bite of my Scramble Wrap Supreme, trying to drown my existential crisis in eggs and tortilla.

With my day officially ruined, I walked out of my apartment and stepped into the elevator, pressing and holding the button for my floor. The thing only worked when I was physically touching it, meaning if I let go, It'd stop halfway and never make it to my floor. It arrived with a ding, and the doors slowly crept open.

I hit the button for the main floor, and the elevator started to move. I kept my finger on the button, watching as the floors crawled past at an agonizing pace. Finally, with a faint ding, the doors slid open. The moment I stepped out, they froze in place behind me, perpetually ajar, waiting for my return.

With a sigh, I stepped outside.

"Wonder if this thing will ever just stop working entirely," I mused aloud. I had gotten into the habit of talking to myself—not like anyone else was around to listen. "That’d be awful. Walking up and down flights of stairs every time I needed to leave? No thanks. I'd rather not turn my legs into spaghetti just to get a change of scenery."

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

I passed through the shattered glass door of my building—the result of an argument with a key fob that refused to work. My solution? A chair. Problem solved.

Outside, the world stood still.

People frozen mid-step, mid-conversation, mid-everything. I had taken to calling them “mannies”—short for mannequins. Some of them had entertaining expressions, like the woman mid-sob whom I named Teary. I imagined she had just broken up with her long-distance boyfriend and would now dedicate herself to a life of lonely luxury.

Then there was Smiley, the little girl with an ice cream cone tilted at a catastrophic angle. I liked to imagine the moment that scoop hit the ground, her entire worldview would crumble, setting off a chain reaction of disappointment that would eventually leave her jaded, untrusting, and utterly alone. Tough luck, kid. Hope you like solitude.

“Maybe I’m getting a little lonely,” I muttered, taking another bite of my breakfast. Then again, loneliness wasn’t exactly new to me. I didn’t have many friends before this mess. Moving away from my family hadn’t helped either. My routine had always been work, sleep, movies—except now with this time thing, the movies and work parts were out of the question.

The library became my new sanctuary. If nothing else, books still worked just fine—my last resort when everything else was simply unusable to keep me sane. So, library it was. Again.

I strolled past the storefronts, casually noting something I had long since accepted. The signs were wrong—letters spaced weirdly, foreign symbols mixed in, some even looking completely alien. More than that, the entire layout of the street was reversed. A fact I had come to notice simply because I had walked to the library so many times when I was in college. I had practically memorized the number of steps it took to get to the Italian subs store, so now that the steps were wrong, it bothered me.

I sighed. Just another thing to add to the list of “weird, but what are you gonna do?”

I finally reached the library, a small but oddly out-of-place three-story building, wedged between taller, more modern structures like an old relic refusing to be forgotten. The bricks were weathered, the steps slightly uneven from years of foot traffic that had long since ceased. I climbed the stairs, each step shifting slightly under my weight, the worn brick settling unevenly beneath my feet, and pushed open the heavy wooden doors. The moment I stepped inside, I was immediately hit with the burnt, bittersweet aroma of fresh coffee, a scent so familiar yet impossibly out of place in this frozen world.

That shouldn’t be possible.

Following the scent, I climbed to the second floor, each step deliberate but unhurried, as if rushing might somehow scare away the absurdity of it all. The library was as still as ever, the bookshelves standing like ancient sentinels, their contents untouched in what might as well have been centuries. Scattered throughout the aisles were mannies, frozen in various poses—some mid-reach for a book, others slumped in chairs, eyes forever locked onto open pages.

Then, I saw her.

A person. A real, moving, breathing person—doing something as mundane as sitting at a desk. It took me a second to process that she wasn’t just another frozen figure, another piece of the eerie diorama that made up my world. No, she was moving, sipping coffee as casually as if the world hadn’t hit pause.

I took another bite of my wrap, because honestly, what else was I supposed to do?

A girl, about my age, sitting at a desk. A moving girl. Not a manny.

I stepped forward slowly, my footsteps muffled by the thick carpet, but I wasn’t exactly trying to be quiet. What was she going to do, run? I doubted she even noticed me yet, too wrapped up in whatever she was doing on her laptop. The glow from the screen illuminated her face, casting sharp shadows across her features, making her look almost surreal in the stillness of the world around us.

I weaved past the frozen figures of library patrons—mannies caught mid-study, mid-sneeze, mid-boredom—my eyes locked on the only other living being I’d seen in what felt like an eternity. She was real. She was here. And she was completely unaware of me standing just a few feet away.

“You got any games on there?” I asked, taking another bite of my wrap.

She nearly launched herself out of her chair, her breath hitching in her throat as her eyes darted wildly across my face, scanning me as if I were some kind of mirage. Her hands clamped down on the desk, knuckles white, like she was bracing herself for a fight or flight response she hadn’t quite decided on yet. Her chest rose and fell with shallow, uneven breaths, and for a moment, she looked like she was debating whether screaming would even do her any good in a world as silent as this one.

“You-” she stammered, her voice barely more than a whisper. "You shouldn’t be..."

I reached for her laptop, just to see what had her so engrossed, but the moment my fingers got close, she lunged—not just a flinch, but a full-body leap across the desk, arms outstretched like she was diving for a live grenade. Papers and books scattered, her chair toppled over, and in the chaos, her coffee cup lifted off the table, floating like everything else in this cursed world.

As she scrambled to secure her laptop, I calmly reached out and plucked the suspended cup from midair. The moment my fingers wrapped around it, the liquid inside came back to life, swirling with renewed heat. I popped the lid off and took a sip. White mocha. Sweet. A little too sweet, honestly, but I'd take whatever flavor I could at this point.

Her eyes, wide and frantic, darted from me to the now-empty space where her coffee had once been. Her breath hitched again, and I could see the gears in her head turning, trying to reconcile what she was seeing with what she thought she knew.

"Time isn't supposed to move. You shouldn't be..." Her voice faltered, her eyes darting away as if she had already said too much. Her fingers clenched the laptop, pulling it closer to her chest, knuckles pale, like she was holding onto the last bit of certainty she had left. It was clear she didn’t want me to see whatever was on that screen, like it held answers she wasn’t ready to share—or perhaps, answers I wasn’t meant to know. The realization flickered across her face, warring with whatever instinct told her to keep quiet. I could see it, the way her breathing shallowed, the way she swallowed hard as if trying to push back the words she wasn't supposed to say. But the damage was already done—she knew what was happening, and more importantly, she knew that I shouldn't be here.

I exhaled slowly, savoring the warmth of the drink with a sip, and locked eyes with her. "What do you know about this hell?"