March of Time
Garth McCarthy

Johnny Muggs remembered being caught up in his mother’s bad mood. The two of them had just been put off the bus to the other side of town, and the driver’s spittle-contaminated words still rang in his ears. “Exact change, big bills don’t count on my bus.”

Johnny’s arm popped at the shoulder as his mother yanked him from one
direction to another, navigating the packed sidewalk at an impossible
pace. She said nothing. In fact, the only sound that emanated from her
anger-twisted face was a periodic sniff, a direct result of the tears
rolling down her cheeks.

Once every so often he would look over his shoulder to see if he could
catch a glimpse of what was chasing them, but understandably there was
nothing there. Suddenly, the race was over. His mother stopped dead in
her tracks, confused. He looked up at her. She was scrutinizing her
watch. Johnny could read the disappointment as her hand dropped to her
side. “It’s too late, the interview is over.”

Johnny peeked at her watch. He didn’t get it. How it was possible for an
hour and a half to pass in just ten minutes? Surely it could not be more
than ten minutes since the incident on the bus? This was a conundrum
that needed solving and perhaps every ounce of gray matter, as his mother
would refer to it, he had.

That night after dinner Johnny lay in bed and stared at the ceiling, the
mystery turning in his mind. Soon, he had memorized the location of every
nail holding the ceiling boards in place. He picked up the Cody Bear
bedside clock his father gave him the day before he left, six months ago.
The second hand marched on ever so faithfully without skipping a beat, but
only five minuets had past. So slow, he thought.

Wrapping himself warmly, he decided to take his thoughts outside. He made
his way downstairs to the courtyard of the apartment block. Once again he
scrutinized the bedside clock in his hand. It seemed to take him more time
to get to the courtyard than to memorize the nails in the ceiling, but it
felt the same. He stood at the entrance of the complex with his eyes
fixed on the sign hanging across the road: DEAD SLOW it read, and when
standing in one place staring at a sign that is how time passed, dead
slow, but if you were in a hurry there was never enough time. But, how
did it all work?

Johnny snapped back from his thoughts with the ripping of the envelope in
the master of ceremonies’ hands. “And the winner of the Nobel Prize for
quantum physics goes to… Jonathan Muggs!” With a grateful smile, the
now aged form of Johnny got out of his seat. “The sign, it all started
with that sign.”

Garth McCarthy spends his days as an IT technician at a South African university, where his daily tasks pay the bills and feed him, but his true passion is storytelling.