THE WAY IT WENT DOWN: ESCAPE

It’s been nine days back now and people are starting to notice. “Annie, what’s up? Are you okay?” Yes. Sure. I’m fine, I’d love to say, but instead say nothing and smile a thin-lipped smile. My mom called that smile my “fuck you” smile.

Mom, I’d like to say a lot of things. I’d love to tell someone my problems, but the group doesn’t want to hear it, no one else will believe it, and if I say anything...

Jet-lagged? No. Oh, no, I’m fine It was a long trip yeah, but I just don’t sleep anymore. Oh, no, no, it’s not that something is stopping me from sleeping I don’t think, it’s more like I’ve forgotten how. It was like riding a bike, or swimming, or something else your body just knew and that knowing is gone. Erased. For good? Hell, I don’t know.

What did you see there, Annie? What did you see there, Annie? What did you see-

Instead of Belize I stare ahead until my eyes blur.

“Twenty-eight and then, ma, which next?” And Isabelle is looking up at me, all eyes, waiting.

I rub my eyes and consider the page of math, and for just a moment it is a rectilinear wall of stone glyphs, lit with reflections of torches on wet viscera. “Annie, don-“, he says to me, again for the millionth time and something is there with us; and his voice drops into the black, like a stone tied to my memory dragging me down-

Am I there now?

Then it’s just me and Izzie under the buzz of the kitchen light and multiplication tables, and then the sun is gone and then it’s dark and silent in the night and I stand in the living room, trying to stifle the laughter that wants to escape me.

I’m losing time. It’s escaping me.

Another day. I know because when the dawn comes in fast-forward I slow myself down to mark it on my arm. Ten slashes. Then Izzie is gone in a blur to the bus. And the sun is moving in the sky in a way I can see it track, smoothly, and I think, was it always like that? And daylight is spinning and vanishing all at the same time.

I stand inside the door and watch time shift on my watch, with the minute hand moving like the second hand, and the second hand is a blur. I marvel as an hour vanishes behind me like half a minute. And then I try...to...stop it.

And it slows, and then crawls and then stops. And then tracks back. Even when I realize what is happening, it tracks back, faster and faster, a rug being pulled beneath me by-

No. No.

And unlike before, my body drifts backwards with an ease of motion, even as the speed of reversal increases, arcing from place to place with the surety of planets dancing reverse in their orbits. Izzie is there ejected back-first from the bus, which is a blur, and then the pages turn backwards on the multiplication tables, and then a fuzzed-out blur of a jet and endless, suctioning doorways pulling me inside until I’m there again. I’m there before.

Good god, I’m there in Belize and time finds its forward track again.

The blood is already on the wall praising the guardian. Praising the gate. Praising time. We did it. We did what we were told. Why would we do this? We did it because we didn't know what would happen. What would have happened?

This is the moment here, again.

What did you see there, Annie?

The light comes down from the roof of the cavern. Sunlight somehow punching through a mile of stone, inside, casting deep shadows behind me.

At the peak of light, there is the tiny, ruined shadow of a child.

It drifts through the air, independent of rules like force and time and space, like it’s the world that is moving around it, instead. I saw this. I saw this already. I saw-

And the treader lands in front of me. Stunted arms. No face. Ruined and ancient, and it stumbles forward one step, and I reach out. I don’t want to reach out but I reach out.

I reach out because that's the moment.

“Annie don-“ Thomas screams before he’s silenced in a blue white light.

I touch it, and this is the the only moment. Everything else is a shadow cast from it across time; an expanse that stretches infinitely in all directions like a golden sea. This thing is a beacon of light, and that light is time. And that time has me, and that’s what I saw. That's what I see. That's all there is.

And I have my answer. What did you see there, Annie? I saw this moment. I am this moment, because it's all that's real and left. 

I didn’t see Annie’s escape. That’s what I didn’t see.