Mara found out she could stop time when she was nine. It wasn’t a grand discovery involving lightning bolts or ancient relics. No, it happened because she didn’t want her ice cream to melt. She blinked hard, like a kid willing a wish into existence, and suddenly the dripping stopped mid-fall. The world hung there, breathing but breathless.
She didn’t know the rules back then. She only knew she could stand in the stillness, move through frozen streets, pluck falling leaves from the air like decorations from an invisible Christmas tree. Birds became feathered statues. Rain turned to crystal confetti. And no matter how far she wandered, the sun stayed where it was, suspended in amber.
The weight of standing outside of time
At first, Mara treated her power like a toy. She’d pause bullies mid-swing, rearrange desks in the classroom, sneak into bakeries for still-warm bread rolls. She even read whole books in a single heartbeat. But soon she learned the stillness wasn’t empty. There was a sound in it—soft at first, like snow landing—but it grew louder the longer she stayed. A low, aching hum that rattled her ribs.
Time, it seemed, didn’t like being stopped.
She could feel the seconds she stole pressing against her. If she lingered too long, her vision blurred at the edges, and she’d return to the moving world dizzy, as though the hours she’d frozen had come rushing back to reclaim her.
The temptation of forever
By seventeen, she’d started using the pause more strategically. She avoided car accidents by stepping into the road after hitting the mental switch. She cheated death by plucking her mother’s phone from the floor before it could shatter, saving the call that led to the paramedics arriving on time.
But the temptation was always there—to stay too long in the pause.
Imagine never having to answer an uncomfortable question. Never losing an argument because you had all the time in the world to think of the perfect comeback. Never aging if you just… stayed still.
She’d sit in the silence, watching the sun drip into the horizon without moving, and wonder what would happen if she just didn’t start time again. Would she become a ghost haunting a world trapped in amber? Or would she crumble into dust, caught in the same suspended instant she was trying to keep?
The crack in the power
It was during one of these pauses that Mara noticed something strange. She wasn’t alone.
A man in a charcoal suit was walking through the frozen street toward her, hands in pockets, looking at her with the kind of knowing smirk that meant trouble.
“First time seeing another one?” he asked.
His voice didn’t belong here. Sound shouldn’t carry in the pause, but it did. He told her there were others—people who could step out of time, each with their own reasons for doing so. Some were careful. Others… weren’t. And when two paused worlds collided, strange things could happen. People could vanish from the timeline entirely.
The cost of touching the pause
Mara learned the real danger wasn’t just staying too long—it was changing too much. Move a person’s hand, and they might drop something they were meant to keep. Shift a car just slightly, and you could rewrite the moment someone’s life was supposed to turn. Time didn’t like gaps. It stitched them up with brutal efficiency, often erasing more than you intended.
Her gift, she realized, wasn’t an escape. It was a responsibility.
Now, when she used the pause, she did it sparingly—fixing small things, saving moments that mattered, resisting the urge to live in the silence where nothing could touch her. Because the stillness was beautiful, but it was also lonely. And the hum never really went away.
It always came back, whispering that the safest place to be was outside of time… but at the cost of losing everything that made life worth restarting.
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