Chapter 3
1832 Words
Unexplained Coincidences
Saturday mornings were quieter.
Charles noticed it the moment he opened his eyes, not because of sound, but because of rhythm. Weekdays had a pulse: traffic humming before dawn, elevators whispering upward, the city tightening itself into purpose. Saturdays were looser. Time wandered. People slept in. Schedules softened.
He checked the clock.
6:11 a.m.
Normal.
He lay still for a moment, listening to the building breathe. There was no pull in his chest yet, no urgency. He had fed only a few hours earlier. Enough to keep the day smooth. Enough to move without friction.
Charles swung his legs over the side of the bed and stood. Running clothes were already laid out, folded precisely on the chair by the window. He dressed quickly, tying his shoes with practiced efficiency. The mirror caught him briefly, relaxed posture, neutral expression, eyes clear.
He did not think about why he ran.
He simply did.
Outside, the air was cool and clean, the kind that sharpened the senses. The city was awake but unhurried. Fewer cars. Fewer people. A version of the world that felt almost honest.
Charles started at an easy pace, long strides eating up the pavement. His breathing settled into a steady rhythm, lungs pulling air smoothly, endlessly. He ran the same route every Saturday morning past the park, down the river path, looping back through quieter residential streets.
Routine mattered.
It kept things aligned.
As he ran, he catalogued small details without effort: the man walking his dog near the bridge, the woman stretching on a bench, the jogger ahead of him keeping an uneven pace. All predictable. All moving forward at the speed they were supposed to.
Time behaved.
For the first twenty minutes, nothing deviated.
Then, somewhere near the park entrance, Charles felt it.
Not hunger. Not pain.
A hesitation.
It was subtle, so subtle that anyone else would have missed it entirely. A fractional drag, like resistance in the air. His stride didn’t falter, but something inside him sharpened, attention snapping into focus.
He slowed slightly, scanning the path ahead.
People passed him in ones and twos. A cyclist zipped by. A couple walked hand in hand, laughing quietly. Nothing unusual. Nothing wrong.
Charles kept running.
The sensation faded as quickly as it had appeared, leaving behind a faint unease. He dismissed it. Saturdays were unpredictable. Looser. That was all.
He rounded a bend where the path narrowed briefly, trees arching overhead. The ground dipped, then rose again. He picked up speed instinctively, body moving on memory.
And then—
Impact.
Not hard enough to hurt. Not soft enough to ignore.
A solid collision, chest to chest, knocking the air clean out of someone else as much as it startled him. Arms flailed briefly. Shoes scraped against pavement.
The woman bounced off him like she’d hit a wall.
“Oh—God—I’m so sorry!”
She faceplanted into his chest before she could stop herself, palms slamming flat against him as she stumbled back. Her breath rushed out in a sharp exhale, hair swinging forward, obscuring her face.
Charles caught her reflexively not because she needed it, but because his body reacted faster than thought. His hands came up, steadying her shoulders for a split second.
Time skipped.
Not stopped.
Skipped.
It was like a dropped frame in a film reel. One moment they were colliding, the next she was already stepping back, cheeks flushed, eyes wide with embarrassment.
“I really wasn’t looking,” she continued quickly, words tumbling over each other. “I should’ve been—are you okay?”
Her voice was warm. Human. Entirely ordinary.
“Yes,” Charles said automatically.
The word came out a fraction slower than intended.
She nodded, already retreating, clearly eager to escape the awkwardness. “Good. Sorry again.”
And then she was gone.
She resumed her run without looking back, ponytail bouncing, pace quickening as if she could outrun the moment itself.
Charles stood still.
Only for a second.
Only long enough to realize that the path ahead of him felt… wrong.
He looked down at his hands.
Nothing had changed. His heart beat steadily. His breath remained even. The world around him continued moving at its expected pace.
But something had misaligned.
He turned slowly, watching the woman disappear down the path, weaving easily between other runners. She did not glance back. Did not hesitate. Did not seem affected in any way beyond mild embarrassment.
Charles checked his watch.
6:42 a.m.
It should have been 6:43.
He frowned.
That was impossible. His internal sense of time was precise to the second. Had always been. Even when clocks lied, even when systems failed, his perception remained intact.
Except, He resumed running, slower now, attention fixed inward. The air felt thicker, like it had briefly resisted him and then yielded.
He replayed the moment in his mind.
The collision. The contact. The skip.
He had felt it the instant she touched him—a ripple, faint but undeniable. As if something had snagged and then corrected itself.
Coincidence, he told himself.
It had to be.
He finished his route without incident, though the rest of the run felt slightly off, like walking on a floor that had been subtly tilted. By the time he returned to his building, the sensation had faded, leaving only a quiet irritation behind.
In the elevator, he stared at his reflection in the mirrored walls.
Nothing had changed.
Back in the apartment, he stretched briefly, then moved to the kitchen. Water. A light meal. Everything in its place.
Still, his thoughts returned to the path. To the way time had stuttered around that woman as if uncertain what to do with her.
Charles shook his head once, sharply.
There were explanations for anomalies. There always were. Fatigue. Residual imbalance. Overfeeding. Underfeeding. Environmental variables.
He did not allow himself to consider anything else.
Later that afternoon, he left again, this time to run errands he usually delegated. Grocery store. Dry cleaner. A deliberate immersion into normalcy.
At the store, a line stalled inexplicably. The register froze. The cashier apologized, tapping keys impatiently.
Charles waited, eyes flicking to the clock above the counter.
It lagged.
Just a second. Just enough to notice.
The register beeped, sprang back to life, and the line moved again.
Coincidence.
Outside, a traffic light turned green late. A pedestrian hesitated mid step, frowning as if unsure why.
Coincidence.
By early evening, irritation had crept beneath Charles’s skin. Not fear. Not concern.
Annoyance.
Time misbehaved when rules were broken. When balances shifted. When something interfered with established order.
He stood by his window as the city slid into dusk, watching lights flicker on one by one.
Somewhere in his mind, the image of the woman surfaced unbidden, not her face, which he had barely seen, but the sensation. The brief contact. The way the world had faltered around her.
He dismissed it.
People collided every day. Paths crossed. Nothing more.
Still, when he checked the clock again 8:19 p.m.
The confusion didn’t announce itself all at once.
It crept.
Later that night, Charles stood in his kitchen, glass of water in hand, staring at the digital clock above the oven.
9:41 p.m.
He turned away to rinse the glass. When he looked back 9:39 p.m.
The numbers corrected themselves a second later, flicking forward as if embarrassed.
Charles froze.
That hadn’t happened in years.
He reached for his watch. It read the same time. Accurate. Steady. Unbothered. His internal sense aligned with it perfectly.
Only the appliance clock had misbehaved.
Electrical fault, he reasoned. Minor. Insignificant.
Still, he unplugged it.
He moved through the apartment restlessly, doing things he hadn’t planned to do, straightening books already aligned, adjusting blinds that were already even. At one point, he stopped mid room, unsure what he’d been about to do.
That, too, was new.
At 10:06 p.m., his phone buzzed with a calendar reminder.
He frowned.
He hadn’t scheduled anything for Saturday nights.
The notification disappeared when he unlocked the screen.
No missed alerts. No upcoming events.
Nothing.
Charles stared at the blank display longer than necessary before setting the phone down.
When he finally lay on the bed, he did not bother turning off the light. He watched the ceiling instead, counting seconds in his head. The rhythm stayed true. His counting never failed him.
Except once.
He reached thirty-seven, then thirty-nine.
He frowned, starting over.
This time, the count held.
Somewhere outside, a car alarm went off and cut short abruptly, like someone had pressed mute instead of silence. The building settled with a soft groan, pipes ticking.
Charles closed his eyes, not to sleep, but to recalibrate.
Images drifted through his mind uninvited: the narrow path, the brief impact, the sound of breath leaving a stranger’s lungs.
The skip.
He sat up sharply.
“No,” he muttered.
He refused to indulge it. Whatever had happened that morning was inconsequential. The world was full of variables. Humans were chaotic by nature. Not every irregularity meant something.
Still, when he rose at midnight to pace the apartment, he found himself standing by the window that overlooked the park.
The same park.
Lights dotted the path below now, casting pale halos on the pavement where runners had passed earlier. It looked ordinary. Entirely unchanged.
Charles rested his palm against the glass.
For just a moment, so brief it could have been imagined, his reflection lagged behind the movement of his hand.
Then it snapped back into place.
His jaw tightened.
That had not happened before.
He stepped away immediately, pulse steady but sharp, every instinct alert. The air in the apartment felt heavier, as if the space itself had thickened. Not hostile. Just… uncertain.
Charles checked the time once more.
12:17 a.m.
Saturday was nearly over.
He dressed quietly, intending to leave, unsure where he planned to go, only that staying still felt wrong. As he reached for his coat, a thought crossed his mind, sudden and unwelcome.
The last time time had behaved like this
He stopped himself.
He did not finish the thought.
Some memories were better left untouched. Some nights were meant to stay buried.
Charles slipped the coat back onto its hook and turned off the lights instead. He lay down again, this time facing away from the clock.
When he finally closed his eyes, the city continued without him, seconds folding into minutes as they always had.
But for the first time in a very long while, Charles could not shake the feeling that Saturday had not simply passed.
It had shifted.
And whatever had caused it had brushed against him briefly, apologized, and kept running unaware that it had left something behind.
Time, after all, had a way of noticing the wrong things too late.
It was already 8:20.
Charles exhaled slowly.
Unexplained coincidences, he told himself, were only coincidences until they repeated.
And Saturday, it seemed, was not finished with him yet.
- Writer
