Time Outside of Time
Things move slowly now, slowly and wrong. Branches bend before the wind comes to them. I can’t hear my footsteps. I can’t hear anything.
Stop walking, I tell myself, and keep walking. Drop the sphere, I tell myself, and even as I watch it roll away from me, it returns to my hand. An old prayer, learned from Grandma Mimi or my college crush or some movie, returns to my lips. I don’t know if I say it out loud. God, I give you my body as a living sacrifice—alive, holy, and pleasing to you—which is your right to demand. In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy—
I come back to myself on top of a hill, walking on a trail. Lights glitter in the valleys below. Silvery fields of dry grass undulate between dark patches of trees. Tall redwoods stand in silhouette a
