Writing Prompt

My dearest, __ When your satin lips first graced mine, the world stopped spinning. Everything but us froze. You, my love, are a time witch, and when I kiss you, time slows its tick until it halts. The air between us lingers for longer than any ordinary air... my nose is still intoxicated with the scent of you. I thought I might return your gift. Enclosed in this letter, you’ll find time really did stop when we kissed. Love you forever and always, Penn __ My dearest, It has been a wonderful life together. All that time we had… I wouldn’t trade it for the world. Some days I ask myself how I can even keep on living. Other days I don’t feel like I’m living at all. Seconds, minutes, hours, days… they are meaningless. There is a gaping hole, a limbo, in which time now sits. Just a numb stretch of nothingness to which the sun rises and falls. Yet you were my sun. My sun has gone down. It is forever night. It is only right that time stopped for you one last time. This watch is not a joyous one. The hands are cold. I may never feel the warmth of them again. Until we meet again, Penn

“How much is this?” The shopkeeper signed. “What does the tag say?” Picking up the small white price tag, Nate flipped it over. “Ten pounds.” “Then it’s ten pounds.” Nate fumbled in his pocket and pulled out a crisp ten-pound note, slamming it on the counter. “I’ll take it.” The silver hair retailer grinned, slid the note over, and curled it into his fist.
“Have a good day.” “Yeah, yeah,” Nate said, already distracted—mesmerised—by his new-old silver device.

A crack cut in a zig-zag across the watches glass, and the aged, yellow enamel face beneath offered scratched and faded roman numerals. The black hands lay crooked, inactive, frozen in time at twenty past two. Whether early morning or afternoon, Nate didn’t know. Around the edge, silver, floral inlay curled elegantly in meandering patterns, moving up and around to meet the linked chain, which he clipped to the pocket of his hoodie. As he reached for the front door of the antique shop, Nate tried to twist the crown at the top of the watch. It turned once, twice, then suddenly, the world froze.

Silence thundered against his ears. Cars outside the windows halted. The old clocks that once ticked around the small, cluttered shop stopped tocking. Blinking, Nate spun on his heels. “Wha—!” he began, but the shopkeeper had vanished, leaving nothing but a spiral of sparkling dust held suspended in the beams of sunlight.

Vibrations hummed through his palm and up to his arm as the pocket watch started to buzz and bounce. The clock hands spun anticlockwise; their once still forms circling faster and faster until they became nothing but a black blur. Nate dropped the watch, and it fell but didn’t fall. Instead, it swung back and forth like the pendulum of a grand clock or a hypnotist’s tool.

The world shook, and Nate watched, horrified, as the little shop peeled, catching alight like a lit sheet of paper, burning from the inside out. Wallpaper flaked away like embers, vases and candlesticks toppled from their places atop shelves and tables. A bright light blinded Nate’s eyes, and he collapsed to the floor, but where his hands should have met the rough carpet of the old antique shop, they collided with hard, black and white linoleum tiles.

Pain shuddered Nate’s bones, and he hissed, sucking warm air through his teeth. Groaning, he clambered to his feet and slipped the pocket watch into his pocket. He brushed the invisible dirt from his jeans, looked up, and his breath caught. He couldn’t believe it.

Honeyed coloured wood surrounded him, stretching around the edge of the vast, grand entrance hall. Two sets of broad ornate stairs climbed before him and split in the middle, curving around to reach another upper floor. A large carved wooden panel sat at the top of the steps, and as Nate peered closer, he could just make out a white, round face of a clock nestled in the centre. It read ten past twelve. Straining his neck, Nate gawked upwards. Glass claimed the ceiling in a decorative ornate wrought-iron dome, and at its centre hung a golden chandelier. The sound of chatter and soft tunes of violins wafted from somewhere outside the hall, and standing there, in the impossible room, Nate had the suspicious yet itching feeling that he had seen the place before. Maybe in a dream or a film. Yes, a film, now, what was it called?

“What the actual...” Nate whispered. He couldn’t believe it, couldn’t… he couldn’t understand. How could he be—

Footsteps thumped, and Nate flinched as a woman came running from around the bottom of the staircase. Under her arms, she held large, white canvas jacket-type objects, their bulky sizes obscuring most of her body. As she came closer, her eyes met Nate’s, and seeming undeterred by his tall, awkward frame loitering in the middle of the floor, she held out one of the items, offering it out for him to take. “Please take a life jacket, sir.” “What? I don’t—” Nate stammered. He took the life jacket, hooking it over his arm. “What’s going on?” “There is no need to panic, sir.” the woman said, but the slight tremor in her voice betrayed the integrity of her words. “It is simply a precaution, but the Captain has ordered that everyone don a life jacket. You are more than welcome to continue with your evening activities.” With a short curtsy, she hurried off, the skirts of her black, old fashioned maid’s dress fluttering as she disappeared through a door at the opposite end of the room.

Turning the life jacket over in his hands, Nate slipped it over his head, the light, chunky weight of it giving him an odd sense of comfort, like feeling it proved that he wasn’t mad, that the fact that he could touch something, something real, meant he wasn’t entirely out of his mind.

A jolt shuddered through the floor, and Nate steadied himself against one of the wooden pillars. Shouts and cries erupted from everywhere, and the sound of shattering glass or china exploded. Doors to the right hurled open, and men dressed in black dinner jackets and women in long, fancy, early twentieth-century dresses hurried out. Some wore their life jackets, but most didn’t, carrying them loosely at their sides. Through the thundering of footsteps, Nate could just make out snippets of conversations.

“What do you suppose it wrong? We are not sinking are we?” a woman in a wide-brimmed hat whispered to her friend, the large white feather protruding from the top of her hat shaking as she walked. “Oh, stop your, fussing. My husband said the Titanic is unsinkable. This is most likely nothing but...”

Nate had stopped listening, his mind reeling. His heart thumped in his chest, and the ground swayed beneath him, whirling like an old-fashioned spinning top. The Titanic? Nate wanted to scream. The actual, bloody Titanic? It had to be a dream. No, it had to be a really, really bad nightmare. Or maybe he had been poisoned by something back in the antique shop—a hidden pile of mysterious powder stuffed between the folds of an antique bag that had somehow escaped into the air. Or maybe a vase had toppled off one of the shelves and knocked him unconscious.

A glint of sliver snapped Nate from his tumbling spiral. A young man, dressed in a sharp black tailcoat, brushed Nate’s arm. Fastened to the pocket of his waistcoat was inexplicably Nate’s pocketwatch.

“Hey!” Nate exclaimed, then slapped a hand over his mouth. The man stopped, causing a couple behind him to trip. Spinning on the heels of his polished shoes, the man scowled, his piercing blue eyes shooting daggers through Nate’s chest. “Pardon?” he spat. Nate flinched, turning away. “Nothing. Sorry...sir.” Eyeing Nate up and down, the man sneered. “Steerage should stay down below,” he hissed and shoved Nate’s shoulder, the back of his head smacking the wooden pillar. “Where they belong.”

Warmth burned Nate’s cheeks as he watched the man follow the rest of the crowd out the doors and then presumably up to the promenade deck, where Nate knew there wouldn’t be enough lifeboats waiting or not enough to save those still down below. His gut twisted, and bile rose in his throat. He wanted to go home. He wanted his bed. The life jacket draped over his shoulders suddenly felt like a lead ball and chain, bolting him to the floor. How did this happen, how did— Cold jolted his hand as he curled his fingers around his pocket watch. He yanked it out. The crack on the glass stared at him like a wicked, cruel smile, teasing him, laughing at him. “I hate you.” Nate said and twisted the crown at the top of the watch.

White, searing light blinded Nate, and his feet slipped, falling from under him. His back struck something soft and prickly, and Nate realised it was carpet. He ran a hand over his body, his life jacket gone. His head twitched from side to side, but the Titanic’s entrance hall had vanished, replaced once again with the musty smell of old books and the cluttered appearance of the little antique shop. “What just happened?” Nate yelped.

The shopkeeper raised an eyebrow and tapped his nose. “I don't know what you mean.”

“As the last witch burned, Dr Foyle smiled at his success. He didn’t believe in this foolishness, of course, but it gave him power. And that afternoon, he was drunk on it.

It had taken a lot of effort to convince the government that even though Salem was 200 years ago, there was a resurgence of witches. How else do you explain women being able to control complex industrial machinery? They must be bewitching the factories, putting the devil into every God-fearing man’s home! These devil-worshippers must be cleansed from the earth!

He removed this engraved pocket watch- paid for by witch hunting- from his waistcoat and joked with his colleagues about how stubborn these bitches must be, taking at least ten minutes to burn. Don’t they know us men have places to be? Important things to do?

His maniacal chuckling caught in his throat. It wrapped around his neck and choked him, squeezing tighter and tighter. His fellow executioners faced similar fates: Dobbins was seizing on the ground, eyes milky white; Williams’ bones cracked and splintered through his skin; and young Jefferson had blood pouring from every orifice.

They should’ve checked the women before they condemned them to burn. If they had done a search before they lit the torches (or even noticed the fake screams of torture afterwards), they would’ve known they were fucking with real witches. Leaders of covens, necromancers, dark blood magic. Elsbeth, Moira, Rosemary.

Moira brushed the ash from her skirts and picked up the pocket watch, right from underneath Foyle’s purpling face. Stopped ticking at 3:15, on that fine Tuesday afternoon. Just as the real villains’ hearts gave one final beat.” The shopkeeper finishes her story. She looks at me, expectantly, almost magically. “So, young man,” she asks, “do you want to buy it?”

That had to just be a story to convince me to buy this stupid watch, right? It’s never managed to stay sold- that old woman must be desperate. I didn’t even want to buy it. Why did I? It has to be a coincidence that I’m having a seizure at 3:15 on this fine Tuesday afternoon. It can’t be Moira from that damn antique shop.

Having nothing better to do today, I went out strolling the streets. I looked in the windows of all the old shops that have been here forever, but I never bothered with before.

In one antique shop, I saw an old Fossil pocket watch, one that brought back memories. I went into the shop, and inquired about it. The shopkeeper was sullen, but handed me the watch before he went off to do whoever he needed to do. I looked at the cover, it was the old Enterprise from the Original Star Trek Series. I opened the watch up, and saw it wasn’t working. The time was 10:13. Damn. Was this the watch?

Memories flooded back. Twenty years ago, I was traveling the country, foolish and carefree. Just the pack on my back, watch in my pocket, camera around my neck. I was going to “make it” as a free lance photographer, sell my photos of random sights I saw on m travels. Ah, the dreams of youth.

It was in Vegas that it happened. Shocker, right? I had run out of money, and decided to try to win some back. You remember when I said I was foolish, right? I was shit at craps, but I tried my luck anyway. Lost it all, out of the streets. Pawned my camera, I could get it back later. Stashed the pack behind a dumpster.

Not having enough for a room, and just enough for a meal, I hunkered down in an alley and ate my cheap sandwich. I heard noises behind me, and saw the roughest looking dude I have yet seen on my travels. He grunted something vile and sexist, and I knew I had to run. He grabbed me, and I whacked his head with the watch. He was thrown off his stride, and went down hard. The watch fell, and cracked. The tome was 10:13. And, again being foolish, I just ran.

No one had seen what what happened, which suited me fine. I doubted the guy was permanently injured, but I didn’t want to find out. My pack was gone, my camera pawned, my watch smashed. Time to end the adventure.

Luck then decided to grace me. On quarter slots, I had actually won enough for a ticket home. Twenty years passed, and I just told the story as an amusing anecdote. I had no regrets. Bought a new camera, still haven’t made it, but I’m trying.

The watch was marked at $10. Foolish for a broken watch, but remember I am foolish? Found the sullen shopkeeper, bought my watch, and strolled back on the streets, grinning to myself. It was time for new adventures.

I walked into the store. I saw my grandfather’s old pocket watch sitting on the counter, being sold to some random stranger. I ran up to the stranger as he was leaving the store, and quickly asked him to hand over the watch. He got upset and started shouting at me with such intense anger in his voice. I began to try to explain that someone must have found it in the streets and turned it in to the antique shop, and it was my grandfather’s watch. He didn’t want to hear it and told me to “get lost”. I quickly snatched the watch from his hands and ran. He tried to chase me, but he ran out of breathe after a few minutes. I looked at the watch and suddenly realized it wasn’t my grandfather’s. I tried to find the man again, but he was long gone. I stumbled back into the antique shop, and there I found a much better pocket watch than anything my grandfather could ever afford. I picked up the watch and asked an employee how much it was. “$73,957” the employee replied. “Would you like to buy it?” “No, thank you” I answered. There was no way I could ever male so much money. I saw a mother and her child walking out of the store, and I swiftly placed a ring on the child’s shoulder. The alarm went off as they walked out of the store, giving me the chance to escape the store, watch in hand. Once I was a few blocks away from the store, I looked down at the pocket watch. The hands were not moving and the time was incorrect. I stole a watch for no reason, it didn’t even work. I stared into the glass of the watch, and suddenly it seemed as if time had stopped. I glanced around and nobody was moving. I stared back into the glass, I was scared. I didn’t know how I had stopped time. Once I looked up again, there was a man standing over me. Everybody was moving again. He snapped his fingers and everyone stopped. It was then that I realized that I had done nothing, and the watch was still an overpriced piece of junk.