text: Somebody had trapped Martin McDermott in slow motion. One second he was making average love to his wife, and the next second for him was two hours for her. By the time he finished his thrust, she had gotten out from under him, dressed herself, dressed *him* (getting his pants buttoned around his beer belly was the hardest part), called the police, ridden next to him on the ambulance, and spent half an hour crying by his side, lamenting her frozen husband. Finally his crotch reached its zenith and Martin realized something was very wrong. He started trying to figure out what was going on. Looking around the hospital room took around 5 seconds. He had no idea how to reach the people around him, who moved about like gnats in a wind tunnel, speaking and moving in lightning-fast patterns that criss-crossed like a cat’s cradle. He cried out a few times, but no one seemed to stop for long enough to hear him. Martin realized he was in slow motion, and everyone else was experiencing time normally. He didn’t know the exact numbers of how much faster time was for them, but after a while staring at a wall clock he worked out that one second for him was two hours for everyone else. 7,200 times faster. The watching and the mental math took about five minutes, which threw him a few days forward--a few days of everyone in real time watching him barely move. As soon as he was certain he had the rate nailed down he saw the faintest pinprick for the nano-est of nanoseconds in the hospital window, some blurry shape with a blurry little gun-looking-thing and a smug blurry smile. He felt a jolt, looked back to the clock, and saw it was going much, much faster now, so fast he had no chance to re-calculate the rate that life was rushing past him. Then the clock was gone and he was within the grey walls of some deteriorating mental institution. He could see paint running off the walls like water from an ice sculpture and brick crumbling like a sandcastle at high tide. He sat in a cell for about 3 minutes, thinking of what he could say to try to express what had happened to him. He watched blotches of color and light flash in and out of his little cell. He could only assume the blotches were his wife and children and doctors and researchers and journalists. Their voices were so high pitched they were out of the range of Martin’s hearing, and the smells changed so fast that his nose was delivering a signal similar to smelling an all you can eat buffet--so much stuff that his nose just gave up and said Ew. It had been 8 minutes for Martin since he had been at home, making love to his wife in their bed, trying to push away thoughts of the little scientist he had bumped with his car on the way to work, who had yelled at him to Slow Down Pal and Martin had said Make Me You Little Dumb Ass and sped away. Martin started to tear up. It had just been a bad morning. He hadn’t meant it. “Fuck”, he said. Instantly he regretted it. He imagined his wife and children watching him make an ‘F’ sound for a few years, before segueing into the “u” sound, and by that time everybody would know what he was saying but they would have to endure a few more years of him going “cccckkkkkk” before he could say anything else. As soon as he finished the word he realized that everyone had stopped listening long ago. He swore to himself that the next thing he said would be much smarter. He wished he could just be alone, to *think* without seeing how fast everyone else’s lives were racing past. In the time it took to have these thoughts and say that single word, the flashing blotches of color’s visits began to decrease in frequency until there were only a few flashes every couple of seconds--Martin *hoped* they were his wife and kids. He laid down and closed his eyes, clearing his head and thinking as hard as he could for the right thing to say to them before they were gone forever. Suddenly he felt a flurry of activity--hands touching his body, face, eyes, droplets of water hitting him, all so fast they were barely recognizable, like being brushed by a hummingbird’s wings. When he opened his eyes, all he saw was absolute black. They must have thought he died. He punched upwards and hit solid, supple wood. He waited about a minute, and then hit again. This time the wood paneling exploded outward, completely rotted and wet and time-eaten. Slowly, surely, he dug upwards, the soil cycling through winter stiffness and summer softness, waiting, trying to pace each stroke with the seasons. Finally, he struck through topsoil and felt the beautiful air embrace his wrist and hand, seasonal temperatures cycling as years whizzed by--hot cool hot cool hot cool--snow fell on him and melted and massive monsoons brushed his fingertips for fractions of a second, like being gently breathed on. After he had his fill of the patterns of the earth on his hand he stuck the other one through. He strained every muscle and pushed his head through the soil like he was being born, and dragged himself gasping onto the fast-growing grass that was already far past his head. He lay there for a minute, appreciating his freedom, thinking about how it had been about 15 minutes for him since he was making love to his wife in his bed thinking about not wanting to go to work tomorrow, and in that time the grass and vines of the graveyard grew around him and embraced and clothed him, and the stiff grey suit he was buried in turned to strips and rags and fell away. He stood up, breaking his plant life cocoon, and looked out at the crumbling graveyard he stood in. He waited a few seconds and he realized he was finally, blissfully alone, his family gone, the place he was laid to rest forgotten. He watched the grass and various plants bloom and drag the few remaining headstones in the graveyard into their grip and break them down into dust. The trees around him blossomed out like fireworks, cycling--green red brown white green red brown white. He looked up to the sky--light dark cloudy light cloudy dark light dark--the earth turning so fast it was like he was watching an old movie, frames flickering and stuttering--and watched stars blink in and out of existence, watched Andromeda get closer on its collision course with the Milky Way. He had the thought that time must be getting even faster for him to see stuff like that. He was happy that he was aging on his time and not the universe’s, or else he would have been long dead. He looked down at where he had been standing and saw it was now covered in several feet of snow, up to his thighs. He watched for a few seconds longer, the snow unchanging, and deduced that it was maybe permanent. He decided to try to find his house, to try to see a photo of his wife and kids or something before the universe blew up. It had been 18 minutes now and finally the sadness of the situation started to hit him. Martin had always been pretty slow at processing his emotions. None of this quite felt real--how was he supposed to react? Was everything really gone? You bump one petty time-slowing scientist on a crosswalk at 8 AM and you’re condemned to watch the end of the world, after your wife and kids spent their lifetimes watching you sort of vaguely think about what to say and all you came up with was a single swear? The scientist never even thought to free him in all that time? He hadn’t even gotten to *watch* anything in his life happen. It was too fast to see. The only things he could watch were the earth’s natural processes. He thanked the earth for being so mercifully slow, and watched the snow pile up and the trees rot away to nothingness for a few seconds. He understood how flowers and trees felt now that he moved at their pace. Martin wished he was better with words. He wished he was smarter. He wished that he had come up with some clever way of using the slow time to make a point--like if he had spent 50 years saying “world peace” maybe people would have listened! What a sacrifice that would have seemed like! He looked up at the sky one last time, and saw what was coming. Without thinking, Martin said “Fuck,” and then Andromeda collided with the Milky Way. There was a flash of white that scraped the walls of the universe and everything within it. It lasted about .00006 of Martin’s Seconds. 20 Martin’s Minutes after Martin McDermott made love to his wife and thought about how much he hated the nasty little beer belly that he had developed, both he and the Earth became scattered dust and thought no more. The universe breathed a little sigh of relief. It always did its best work when it was alone.