Just Enough Time

When Cher sang “If I Could Turn Back Time” she had no idea that I had been doing that and much more for several years now. Time was never my friend, or so I thought, until the day of my accident. It was one of those freak occurrences that I would normally laugh about if it had happened to someone else. I was on a tropical vacation, enjoying the surf and sand, when a gust of wind dislodged a coconut from it’s branch high in a tree and it hit me square on the forehead. I know, hilarious right, like something out of a 50s cartoon. The actual effect of the accident was that I was in a coma for three weeks.

I finally came to with a splitting headache surrounded by beeping machines. As I struggled to regain my equilibrium, I pushed a tray with a drink on it. As the glass began to tumble from the tray the fist word to pop into my mind was stop, which is exactly what the glass did. It just hung in mid-fall defying gravity. My first reaction was to dismiss what I was experiencing as an effect of the coma and real time would take over letting the glass continue to the floor. The glass continued to hang in space until I grabbed it, used a swooping motion to put the spilled liquid back in the container, and replaced it on the tray. My next thought was that’s better, and the sounds in the room resumed.

I left the hospital several days later, not mentioning the incident to anyone. It was time to experiment with my new found superpower, but first I needed more information. My first stop was the local library where I read up on time travel and time manipulation. Of course, everything I read was theoretical, but the one central theme was described as the Butterfly Effect. If a butterfly flaps it’s wings on one side of the earth it causes an event on the opposite side of the globe. Minor pauses in time to rescue a falling glass may have little affect on anything or it could cause an auto accident in a different part of the world because the flow of time was interrupted. This was definitely nothing to use to entertain guests at a dinner party.

I left the library playing out different scenarios in my mind that would justify using my new power. Ironically it was while I was deliberating the question that a small child broke away from her mother and ran into the path of an oncoming truck. Stop I shouted in my mind, and all activity froze. I walked to the girl, picked her up and returned her to her mother, placing her hand in her mother’s hand, then I thought the word Go. All motion returned to normal with the truck passing the mother and child without incident. The Butterfly Effect could mean that the girl would later give birth to the next Einstein or the next Jeffry Dommer. No way to tell. What I did know for certain was I saved a life today and that can’t be bad.