Time Heals All Wounds
by
Samantha Simpson
Time law dictates that there must be balance, and anyone who tampers with the way things are, were, and will be deserves the eternal minute. By the time this minute ends, the executioner’s blade, sharpened just for this occasion, will have rusted and dulled--but it will have only just pierced my skin. By the time this blade begins twisting inside my heart, I will have withered to bone.
This is the punishment my mother promised would arrive if I kept doing how I do. She used to sneer at the news whenever a time thief, draped in ancient pearls or covered in 9000-year-old henna designs, smirked from the screen. “Nasty,” she said, “Those are fools.” She worked in a diner and made enough money to feed me bologna sandwiches five nights a week.
Supposedly time crime doesn’t pay; those who do the time crime will do the time… time. Even the pettiest theft of time--snatching two minutes from Caesarion’s reign in 40 BC, filching ten minutes from the 1977 blackout in New York--was rewarded with time loops through the French Revolution, the Middle Passage, and the final season of Family Matters on CBS. I’ve done that time. I squeezed my eyes shut when the guillotine blade sliced through the pale necks of aristocrats, but I couldn’t block out the thuds of those heads landing in baskets. The stench of my ancestors floating above and beneath the waves of the Atlantic has crammed itself into my nostrils and stayed with me. The laugh track layered over Steve Urkel’s snorts still seeps into my nightmares.
Still: I did what I did. The 60 slave ‘droids stranded on a plantation in Barbados in 1682 needed legs. Those machines flailed their arms at the sun, their circuits humming, while their legs lay foot to hip in a crate stuck at a Sandals resort in 1999. Laurel met me there, ordered me a virgin pina colada. “I’m proud of you,” she said. She called this crime my magnum opus. “You’re making the world a better place.” I told her I wasn’t actually going to put the legs on the androids who would replace the people toiling in the 17th century sugar cane. “I’m not even swapping out the slaves--”
“Don’t call them that.” She checked her hololine. “See? We’ve been calling them enslaved people since the late twentieth century.”
I rolled my eyes. “Look, I’m just dropping off some parts,” I said. Laurel launched into a sermon about how this switch would allow black art and letters to blossom ahead of the Harlem Renaissance. “You mean the art and letters you plan to steal?” I said. That shut her up.
I only made it to 1843 with those ‘droid legs. My mother most likely sneered at my mugshot as she got ready for another shift at the diner, eight hours on her feet that will end long before this eternal minute is done. The blade will stay its course forever.
This is the punishment my mother promised would arrive if I kept doing how I do. She used to sneer at the news whenever a time thief, draped in ancient pearls or covered in 9000-year-old henna designs, smirked from the screen. “Nasty,” she said, “Those are fools.” She worked in a diner and made enough money to feed me bologna sandwiches five nights a week.
Supposedly time crime doesn’t pay; those who do the time crime will do the time… time. Even the pettiest theft of time--snatching two minutes from Caesarion’s reign in 40 BC, filching ten minutes from the 1977 blackout in New York--was rewarded with time loops through the French Revolution, the Middle Passage, and the final season of Family Matters on CBS. I’ve done that time. I squeezed my eyes shut when the guillotine blade sliced through the pale necks of aristocrats, but I couldn’t block out the thuds of those heads landing in baskets. The stench of my ancestors floating above and beneath the waves of the Atlantic has crammed itself into my nostrils and stayed with me. The laugh track layered over Steve Urkel’s snorts still seeps into my nightmares.
Still: I did what I did. The 60 slave ‘droids stranded on a plantation in Barbados in 1682 needed legs. Those machines flailed their arms at the sun, their circuits humming, while their legs lay foot to hip in a crate stuck at a Sandals resort in 1999. Laurel met me there, ordered me a virgin pina colada. “I’m proud of you,” she said. She called this crime my magnum opus. “You’re making the world a better place.” I told her I wasn’t actually going to put the legs on the androids who would replace the people toiling in the 17th century sugar cane. “I’m not even swapping out the slaves--”
“Don’t call them that.” She checked her hololine. “See? We’ve been calling them enslaved people since the late twentieth century.”
I rolled my eyes. “Look, I’m just dropping off some parts,” I said. Laurel launched into a sermon about how this switch would allow black art and letters to blossom ahead of the Harlem Renaissance. “You mean the art and letters you plan to steal?” I said. That shut her up.
I only made it to 1843 with those ‘droid legs. My mother most likely sneered at my mugshot as she got ready for another shift at the diner, eight hours on her feet that will end long before this eternal minute is done. The blade will stay its course forever.
NUNUM
Blending Flash Fiction & Art
