The sand blew away.
He felt himself hanging from something.
He heard distant music and laughter.
He was back on Earth.
EARTH
33
Lorraine needed cigarettes.
She pulled into a strip mall and passed a nail salon. She remembered taking Sarah here once, when she was eleven.
“Can I have ruby-red polish?” Sarah asked.
“Sure,” Lorraine said. “How about your toes?”
“I can do them, too?”
“Why not?”
Lorraine watched Sarah’s amazed expression as a woman placed her feet in a small tub of water. She realized how little anyone doted on her daughter, what with Lorraine working and Tom always getting home late. When Sarah turned to her, beaming, and said, “I want whatever color toes you’re getting, Mom,” Lorraine vowed that they would do this more often.
They never did. The divorce changed everything. Lorraine walked past the salon window and saw many empty chairs, but she knew Sarah would rather be arrested these days than sit next to her mother for a manicure.
Grace needed groceries.
She could have written a list, sent someone from the staff. “You don’t need to do chores,” Victor always told her. But over time, she realized the tasks that swallowed many people’s days only left a hole in hers. Gradually, she took them back.
She moved her cart up the supermarket aisles now, taking celery, tomatoes, and cucumbers from the produce department. In the last few months she had resumed cooking to prepare healthy meals for Victor—nothing processed, everything organic—hoping to buy him more time through a better diet. It was a small gesture, she knew, a stick against the wind. But all she had to cling to was hope.
A healthy salad tonight, she told herself. But as she passed the ice cream freezer, she grabbed a pint of mint chocolate chip, Victor’s favorite. If he wanted a moment’s indulgence, she would have that ready, too.
34
It was a December festival in a small Spanish town.
Street musicians gathered in the plaza, amid tables loaded with tapas of shrimp, anchovies, potatoes. A fountain in the plaza’s center contained coins thrown by hopeful lovers. Visitors sat on the edge and dangled their feet in the water.
Hanging near that fountain, from a plywood base, was a life-sized papier-mâché mannequin of a bearded man holding an hourglass. EL TIEMPO, the sign read. FATHER TIME. Beneath it was a plastic yellow bat.
Every few minutes, someone walked by and swatted the mannequin with that bat. It was tradition. Whack out the old year, welcome in the new. Onlookers yelled, “Ooyay! Ooyay!” and laughed and toasted.
A little boy broke free of his mother’s grip and ran to the mannequin. He lifted the bat and looked for approval.
“OK … OK …,” his mother yelled, waving.
Just then, the sun emerged from behind a cloud, and a strange light cloaked the village. A sudden wind blew sand across the plaza. The boy paid it no mind. He brought the bat around full force on the papier-mâché figure.
Whack!
Its eyes opened.
The boy screamed.
Dor, hanging from a plywood wall, felt a twinge in his side.
His eyes opened.
A little boy screamed.
The scream so jolted Dor that he jerked backward and his robe ripped off two nails from which it hung. He fell to the ground, dropping the hourglass.
The boy’s scream suddenly stopped. Actually it held and faded, like a long trumpet note. Dor scrambled to his feet. The world around him had just slowed to a dreamlike state. The boy’s face was locked in mid-scream. His yellow bat hung in the air. People at a fountain were pointing but not moving.
Dor picked up the hourglass.
And he ran.
At first, he ran as fast as he could,
keeping his head down, hoping no one would notice him. But he was the only thing moving. The whole world had been paused. No wind blew. No tree branches swayed. People Dor saw appeared nearly frozen—a man walking a dog, a group of friends holding drinks outside a bar.
Dor slowed. He looked around. By our standards, he was on the rural outskirts of a small Spanish village, but to him, there were more people and structures than he had seen in his lifetime.
Herein lies every moment of the universe, the old man had said. Dor observed the sand in the hourglass. It, too, had slowed to a near stop, only a few grains dripping through, as if someone had choked the flow.
Dor walked for miles, holding that hourglass. The sun barely moved in the sky.
His shadow followed behind him, although all other shadows seemed to be painted on the ground. When he reached a more deserted area, he climbed a hillside and sat. Climbing made him think of Alli, and he longed for that old world—the empty plains, the mud-brick homes, even the quiet. In this world he heard a constant hum, as if a hundred sounds were being mashed into one note. He didn’t yet know this was the sound of a single slowed moment.
Down below Dor saw a stretch of road, straight and charcoal-colored with a white stripe down its center. He wondered how many slaves were needed to build such a smooth surface.
You sought to control time, the old man had said. For your penance, the wish is granted.
Dor thought about his arrival on Earth, how he had fallen and dropped the hourglass. That was when everything changed.
Perhaps …
He turned the hourglass sharply to the side, then back again.
The sand began to flow freely. The humming stopped. He heard a whoosh. Then another. He looked down and saw cars speeding along the road—only he had no concept of cars, so he could only imagine they were beasts of some unimaginable speed. He quickly snapped the hourglass back.
The cars stopped in place.
The hum returned.
Dor’s eyes widened. Had he just done that? Brought the world to a near standstill? He felt a surge of power so great, it made him shiver.
35
The night started awkwardly, but the alcohol changed that.
Ethan brought a bottle of vodka. Sarah acted nonchalant. Although she was in no way a drinker, she quickly took a sip. Even a girl ranked third in her class academically knows enough to pretend she’s had vodka before.
They sat in his uncle’s warehouse—Ethan’s idea, since he didn’t really commit to the evening until 8:14 P.M., by texting, “Over at my uncle’s if u want 2 come”—and they drank from paper cups and mixed in orange juice that Ethan grabbed off the shelf. Sitting on the floor, they laughed about a dumb TV show they both confessed to watching. Ethan also liked action movies, especially the Men in Black series, where the actors wore suits and ties and sunglasses, and Sarah said she liked those movies, too, although truthfully she hadn’t seen them.
She wore the same low-cut blouse she had worn the morning at the shelter, figuring he must have liked it, and he did seem attentive. At one point her phone rang (her mother, God!) and when she made a face, Ethan said, “Lemme see.” He took her phone and programmed a special ring tone, a shrill, heavy-metal music lick, that would signal whenever her mom was calling.
“You hear her, you ignore her,” he said.
Sarah laughed. “Oh, that is so great.”
After that, things got blurry. He offered to rub her back and Sarah gladly accepted; his hands on her shoulders made her shiver then melt. She tried talking, nervously, about how she didn’t really have friends at school because they all seemed so immature, and he said yeah, a lot of those kids were losers, and she said she was stressed over getting into college, and he rubbed her shoulders deeper and said she was smart enough to get in anywhere, which made her feel good.