Flash Fiction

Time is the subject of Snapshot, a flash piece originally written for the 6 Sentences network, which looks at what time is and how it's perceived. It started out as the beginning of a chapter of a now defunct novel, so I recycled the main theme and re-hashed it. A resourceful writer never throws anything out!

The structure of the piece is set up to allow each paragraph to start with the word 'Time', with the exception of the last line which closes the piece.



Snapshot

Time - if only there was more of it, because the next second might be your last - like a fleeting glimpse of life in a kaleidoscopic burst of colour, a sudden camera flash or perhaps a swirling grey blur of approaching death, or maybe it could be the deep maw of nothing.

Time is a memory, a snapshot, an invention; seconds, minutes, hours...perceived as an entity, yet it neither exists as a being nor is sentient, but it yields and bends, it can be manipulated, and it moves even when it is still; it seems to slow and falter with tainted fragility, just like us.

Time has many faces, none that can be seen, sometimes smiling and frowning with invisible disparity between eclipses of human fortitude and deprecation.

Time means everything and nothing, it’s a snapshot of life, an invention of means, an effort to measure what isn’t really there, and it never stops, even when we do, ticking into infinity like a cosmic clock made of interstellar dust, and it only encroaches when we say goodbye, and somehow we allow it to hurt.

Time – if only there was more of it, because the next second might be your last and snapshots in time are all we have our when our time ceases and the fragility of life crumbles.

If only we could rewind and pause our invention; what then could we do with time?