Chapter 1: The Shock
The air in Damien Cross’s studio tasted of turpentine and dust, a familiar grit on the tongue. Afternoon light, the color of weak tea, bled through the soot-streaked window overlooking the fire escape, doing little to lift the gloom of the room. It was a beautiful mess. Canvases in various states of undress leaned against every wall—a ghostly parliament of half-formed faces and unresolved landscapes. One, a fever-dream depiction of the bodega on the corner, was more paint than intention, slashes of violet and angry orange where the awning should be.
Damien himself was a study in focused dishevelment. He knelt on the floorboards, which were a history of his artistic crimes in splatter and drip, before an open socket. A single bare bulb above the workbench flickered, a persistent, stuttering heartbeat that was starting to feel personal. The wiring in the old walk-up was a nervous system of cloth-wrapped copper and dubious junctions, and the outlet had given up the ghost two days prior, taking his only good studio lamp with it.
“Come on, you antique piece of shit,” he muttered, not for the first time. His hands, slender and marked with a permanent constellation of paint stains—phthalocyanine blue under the nails, a smear of cadmium red like a birthmark across the knuckle—worked with a focused clumsiness. He wasn’t an electrician. He was a painter who understood YouTube tutorials and possessed a dangerously high tolerance for risk.
The tools were laid out on a newspaper: a pair of needle-nose pliers with rubber handles worn slick, a screwdriver, a roll of electrical tape. The innards of the wall gaped at him, a confusing tangle of black, white, and copper. He’d turned the breaker off. He was ninety percent sure. The other ten percent was a quiet, thrilling hum in the base of his skull.
He reached in with the pliers, intent on straightening a bent connector. His sleeve brushed a loose strand of copper.
The world turned white.
Not a metaphorical white. A searing, absolute, and soundless annihilation of color and sense. It was a star being born in the cavity of his chest, its roots clawing down his arm and up his neck, fusing his jaw shut. His skeleton was a filament in a giant’s lamp. He could not scream. He could not let go. The pliers were a part of him, welded to his hand, a conduit for a river of pure, raging voltage.
This is it, the coherent part of his mind managed to whisper. This is how you die. In paint-stained jeans, over a twenty-dollar lamp.
Then, as abruptly as it seized him, it stopped.
The white collapsed into a profound and ringing silence. Damien was on his back on the floor, staring up at the water-stained ceiling. The air smelled sharply of ozone and burnt hair. His own, he realized. Every nerve ending fired pain signals in confused, discordant bursts. He gasped, a raw, ragged sound that seemed obscenely loud in the quiet.
He rolled onto his side, pushing himself up with trembling arms. The pliers clattered to the floor. His right hand was blistered, the skin angry and tight. He blinked, waiting for the room to stop tilting.
It didn’t. But it was wrong.
The weak tea-light from the window was gone. Instead, the room was illuminated in a strange, uniform twilight, as if viewed through a sheet of gray gel. The flickering bulb above the workbench was frozen in mid-stutter, a perfect, unblinking teardrop of light. A swirl of dust motes, previously dancing in the sunbeam, hung motionless in the air like fixed stars. The distant, ever-present soundtrack of Brooklyn—the grumble of a truck, a shouted conversation, the thump of a bassline from the apartment below—was gone. The silence was absolute, a physical pressure on his eardrums.
“Hello?” His voice was a stranger’s, thin and swallowed by the stillness.
He stumbled to his feet, his legs wobbling. He took a step towards the window. His movement felt normal, but everything else… wasn’t. On the fire escape, a pigeon was suspended in mid-launch, wings spread but utterly still, a statue of feathers and ambition. On the street below, a car was frozen in the act of passing a double-parked delivery van, a blur of color that went nowhere. A man on the sidewalk was caught mid-stride, one foot eternally poised above the concrete, a plume of his exhaled breath hanging before him in a perfect, icy cloud.
Panic, cold and slick, coiled in his gut. He was dreaming. He had to be. He was dead on the floor, and this was some bizarre neurological farewell party.
He slapped his own face. The sting was sharp, immediate, real. He grabbed the half-unwrapped chocolate bar from his workbench. It was solid, cool. He could break off a piece. He could smell the sugar. He let it drop, and it fell, it moved, clattering onto the bench while the dust motes beside it didn’t so much as tremble.
His breath started coming in short, sharp gasps. The room felt airless. He needed sound. He needed motion. He lurched to his old record player, jabbing the start button. Nothing. No power. He reached for the tone arm to manually drag it onto a record, but the mechanism was locked, immovable as granite. He picked up a pencil from the floor and threw it at the largest canvas. It flew in a smooth, predictable arc—the only moving thing in the universe besides him—and bounced off the stretched linen with a tap that was deafening.
The sound of his own panic was unbearable. He clutched the sides of his head. “Stop. Stop, stop, stop, go back, please, just go back.”
The thought was a primal, pleading mantra. Go back.
A sudden, violent lurch twisted his insides. The gray-gel light vanished. The bulb above the bench flickered frantically, then resumed its erratic pulse. The pigeon on the fire escape completed its launch with a frantic clatter of wings. The truck on the street grumbled past. The dust motes resumed their chaotic dance.
Sound and time crashed back over him like a wave, leaving him staggering, drenched in the normalcy of it all. He slumped against the wall, sliding down to sit on the floor, his heart hammering against his ribs. The burned throb in his hand was now a grounding anchor.
It took five minutes for his breathing to slow. Ten for the tremors to subside. He stared at the offending socket, then at his blistered hand, then at the perfectly still chocolate bar on the bench.
A slow, terrifying wonder began to uncoil, pushing the panic aside. It wasn’t a dream. It wasn’t death.
He had stopped time.
The implications arrived not in a grand epiphany, but in small, insistent whispers. He looked around his studio, his kingdom of scarcity. The empty coffee cups spoke of countless sleepless nights. The tubes of paint were nearly squeezed flat. The eviction notice, tucked under a mug but glaringly visible, announced its own urgency.
He looked at his hand. The pain was real. The power… the power had to be real, too.
He had to test it. The fear was still there, a live wire in his chest, but it was now tangled with a giddy, overwhelming curiosity. He focused on the feeling of that moment after the shock—a strange, static hum behind his eyes. He tentatively reached for it, mentally pushing.
Nothing happened.
He frowned, closing his eyes. He thought of the silence, the stillness. He imagined the world grinding to a halt. He thought, very clearly: Stop.
A subtle vibration started in his teeth. The hum behind his eyes intensified into a low-frequency buzz. The flickering light of the bulb stretched, then solidified into a steady beam. The faint sound of a siren several blocks away dwindled into nothingness, not fading, but being severed.
He opened his eyes.
The gray world had returned. The silence was absolute, profound. He was inside a photograph. A living man in a dead moment.
A laugh bubbled out of him, tinged with hysteria. He stood up, walking slowly through his studio. He waved a hand through the suspended dust motes; they parted around his fingers, then snapped back into their fixed positions as his hand passed. He blew on them; his breath displaced them, sending them into a new, frozen configuration. He was a god in a dollhouse.
His gaze fell on the broken toaster, then drifted to the pristine, gold-plated pocket watch that sat beside it, a stolen treasure from a thrift store, too beautiful to use, too valuable to sell. An idea, petty and thrilling, formed.
He walked to the frozen window. On the street, a delivery guy was leaning against his idling scooter, texting. Damien focused, and with a mental nudge that was becoming more familiar, he stepped out of his own studio, leaving time stopped.
The stairs of his walk-up were eerily silent. The door to old Mrs. Gable’s apartment was ajar, the scent of simmering lentils hanging unmoving in the hall. He walked out onto the street.
The frozen city was a cathedral of stillness. He walked between the unmoving cars, their engines silent, their drivers locked in expressions of mild irritation or blank focus. He approached the delivery guy. The man’s face was illuminated by the glow of his phone screen, which displayed a half-typed message. Damien carefully plucked the phone from his stiff fingers. The screen went dark the moment it left the man’s touch. Damien slipped it into the guy’s open jacket pocket. Then, with a delicacy he usually reserved for fine brushstrokes, he reached up and gently tilted the man’s helmet forward until it covered his eyes. He stepped back, admiring the still-life of a man momentarily baffled by sudden darkness.
The laugh came easier this time, pure and unburdened. This was better than any painting.
He wandered further, a ghost in the machine. He peered into café windows at patrons suspended mid-sip, their coffee sloshing in immutable waves inside their cups. He adjusted a man’s crooked tie. He plucked a single, perfect rose from a florist’s outside display, twirling it between his fingers. The morality of it was a distant, blurry concept, easily overshadowed by the sheer, exhilarating novelty of it all.
Then he saw her.
Cora.
She was three storefronts down, standing outside the used bookstore where she worked. She was caught in the act of pushing a cart of new arrivals back inside, one hand on the door, her head turned as if she’d just heard someone call her name. The late afternoon sun, frozen in its trajectory, caught the auburn highlights in her chestnut hair, turning it into a cascade of burnished copper and shadow. She wore a faded band t-shirt and jeans with a hole in the knee, and she was, without contest, the most vividly real thing in this monochrome world.
Damien’s breath hitched. His crush was a quiet, constant ache, a background hum to his daily life. Seeing her here, in his stolen moment, felt profoundly intimate and utterly invasive.
He approached slowly, his earlier playfulness gone. He stopped a few feet away, just looking. A strand of hair had fallen across her cheek. He had the insane, overwhelming urge to reach out and brush it back. His fingers twitched at his side. He could. No one would ever know. Not even her. He could touch her face, and to her, it would be as if a breeze had done it.
His hand lifted, trembling slightly. The conscience he thought was easily overruled spoke up, small but clear. This isn’t a painting. This is a person.
He lowered his hand, clenching it into a fist. Instead, he simply looked his fill, memorizing the curve of her lip, the faint dusting of freckles across her nose, the intelligent, alert set of her features even in stasis. It was a portrait more captivating than anything he could ever paint.
A motion down the alley next to the bookstore caught his expert eye—a shift in the pattern of shadow and frozen light. He tore his gaze from Cora and peered into the gloom.
There, a man was frozen in the act of looming over another figure pressed against the wall. A mugging. Suspended in its prelude. The aggressor’s face was contorted in a snarl, one hand pulling back, likely to throw a punch. The victim, a young woman, had her arms coming up in a hopeless, flinching block.
Damien’s blood went cold. The voyeuristic thrill of the frozen city evaporated. This wasn’t a playful still-life. This was violence, paused.
He could walk away. He could restart time and the event would simply proceed, terrible and unknowable to him. He would never have to think of it again.
But he was here. And he could do something.
He moved into the alley, the silence pressing in on him. He studied the scene. The mugger was big, with thick shoulders and a jacket that smelled of stale smoke and sweat. The woman’s eyes were wide with a fear that was not yet fully realized, trapped in her neural pathways.
What was the right move? Disarm him? He looked at the man’s raised fist. He could try to grab it, to hold it back when time restarted. But the man’s strength, his momentum, would be real. Damien was lean, not strong. It could go very wrong.
He thought of the pliers in his studio, the simple, brutal physics of a tool.
An idea came, cold and precise.
He walked back to his studio, his footsteps the only sound in the world. He retrieved the needle-nose pliers from the floor. He returned to the alley. He focused on the mugger’s swinging arm. He didn’t try to move the arm itself. Instead, he carefully, so carefully, opened the jaws of the pliers and clamped them onto the thick, rubbery belt loop at the back of the man’s jeans. He then took the other end and, with some effort, hooked it onto the heavy, rusted handle of a nearby industrial dumpster.
He stepped back. The image was absurd: a grown man, frozen mid-assault, tethered to a dumpster by a pair of pliers. When time restarted, the physics would be unforgiving. The man’s own attacking momentum would be arrested by a sudden, brutal anchor. He would be yanked backwards, thrown off balance. It would give the woman a chance to run.
It was not heroic. It was a clever, mechanical intervention. It felt right.
Damien took one last look at Cora, a silent promise to return to her in the flowing time, and then turned his gaze to the mugger. He focused, letting the static hum build.
Go.
The world slammed back into motion with a roar of sound and light. Damien flinched, now just a man standing at the mouth of an alley.
He heard a startled, pained yelp, the clang of metal on brick, and a string of furious curses. He saw the young woman stumble forward, her defensive pose now meeting no resistance. She blinked, confused, then saw the mugger sprawled on the ground, tangled and struggling against the pliers hooked to the dumpster. Her survival instincts kicked in. She didn’t hesitate. She turned and sprinted out of the alley, right past Damien without a second glance.
The mugger was wrestling with the pliers, finally ripping them free. He scrambled to his feet, his face a mask of rage and confusion. He looked around, his eyes sweeping past Damien, who was doing his best impression of a passerby just noticing a disturbance. The man seemed to decide the universe itself had conspired against him. With a final, baffled curse, he clutched his lower back and hurried away in the opposite direction.
The alley was empty again, save for Damien and the lingering echo of violence. His heart was pounding, but it was a clean, adrenal thrill. He had changed something. He hadn’t fought; he had engineered. He had used the stillness to impose a new equation.
He walked back to his studio on unsteady legs. The eviction notice seemed to pulse under the mug. He looked at his blistered hand, then at the pristine pocket watch. The gears in his mind, always churning with composition and color, now turned with a different kind of potential.
Financial gain. The whisper was back, louder now. Artistic inspiration—to paint not just what was, but what is when no one is looking. And his own amusement… a world laid bare for his inspection and subtle alteration.
He picked up the gold watch, feeling its cool, solid weight. In the flowing time, its hands ticked forward with solemn precision. But he knew a secret now. He could stop those hands anytime he wanted. He could walk between the seconds.
He sat down at his workbench, the silence of the room now feeling different—not empty, but charged, waiting. He stared at a blank canvas, the possibilities no longer confined to pigment and medium. They were infinite, suspended, his for the taking.
He just had to reach out and pluck them.