Half an Hour Then Half an Hour Then

She still thought of Herself as a person, even as a You can follow Joshua Ryan Bligh on Twitter @bligh_ryan.

She. She persisted in this though Her body had long ago turned to bones and dust, dust that lay unmoving in piles around the dark iron frame of

Her bed. Whoever had placed Her within these confines had not furnished a mattress. Her skeleton reclined across the metal webbing between the cross rails.

A few bones had fallen to the floor. She was very much alive. In a sense. Her body had always been of secondary importance, more an accessory than the collection vital tubes and organs bodies were for most people. Unlike others, She was not limited to a locus of flesh, but could extend Her consciousness and influence far beyond it. When Her body had still existed, it was little more than a soft envelope around what She was at Her core. The core was what remained. A mote of Her. A concentrated particle of Her force that, despite its prison, could and did continue to reach into the world, turned and tuned it in ways both malevolent and kind. Or perhaps this is a mistake of interpretation. For ill or better, Her effects on the world were no longer out of good or evil will, but rather something much more menial (though no less important): a balm on the ever-present threat of boredom. Half An Hour She did not sleep. The room was all She could remember. By decree of Her jailor (whoever they were), She had reign over no more than a handful of minutes. Something like half an hour, more or less. A snippet of reality that played over and Then Half An Millennia passed within Her confines, and yet Her window into the world remained fixed on a period of time roughly the duration of Stravinsky’s Apollon Musagète.

Hour Then…

JOSHUA BLIGH

again in a loop.

The room was dark.

But She had spent so much time in it that She saw it all despite the absence of light.

All in black though. All of it. If She were to draw the room, it would end up looking like a black page, but She (were Her fingers not on the floor) would be able to point out where each object was within that sheet.

Her torments and gifts upon the world from Time X until Time Y turned quite creative toward

the end. Indeed, so creative that to others, unfamiliar with Her past work, they would seem mundane. At the beginning She pursued interruptions of the fantastic kind, turning moments of commonplace into outlandish or garish or bizarre, disrupting the lives of those people within her grasp of appointed time. Giant spiders creeping through doors at night, their shadowed forms bathed in midnight hues, the creaks of their mandibles dripping poison. Angels sweeping down from the skies to stop midair a bullet destined for a child’s skull. For half an hour, the world would be filled with the stuff of dreams and nightmares.

Toward those final half-hours She instead wielded her power, Her invulnerable influence, to alter things in ways no one but She would notice. The avenues of cataclysms and terror and rapture had become so worn that they did little to move the creeping boredom. Biological organisms’ reactions, even to vastly different stimuli were unfortunately homogenous. She could create a complex beast from Her mind, a perfect Chimera, its body unlike anything ever seen before, the details and design flawless…and a man would respond the same were She to give the ground a little shake or lead a tiger into his home. He’d piss himself. Sending forth any such dramatic conjurings no longer bore the force to distract Her from the knowledge that Her body no longer existed, that She was but a conscious speck, not even a proper she.

One day (or night…all the same really) Her creativity came to a sudden peak with the realization that She had one path She had never thought to explore, one different from all others, indeed apparently antithetical to Her strained efforts at escaping boredom.

She did nothing.

Until that moment She had been director and audience for countless half-hours. A non-influence would be truly novel. To do nothing more than gaze. It simply had not occurred to Her that instead of engaging, She could withdraw.

To not know the moments in their entirety would be more full an experience than She had ever had. Even in Her most minute of changes, She knew a shred of the chain of causality. But if She did nothing…

If She had still had a heart it would have skipped with the excitement.

The half hour played out without Her. People commuted to work, and She did not change their routes. People lived and died, much as they had countless times before, but She did not guide them, lent not Her voice or will to the results. Everywhere She looked, people simply did. Their actions wove together into a tapestry of existence absent of Her. She watched.

As the final moments of the loop arrived She vibrated.

She realized that never again would She be able to experience this as new. The only deviations could be those caused by Her. From each subsequent loop She could either reach into the world or not, and She now already had not. And She never could not again. But the loop did not reset. She shuddered as She saw the world, for the first time in memory, continue to unfold in radiant novelty. New words were spoken that did not come from Her. New deaths. Births. Stars exploded, launching colors She could not name into the abyss of space. All of it without Her. Rapt, She continued to gaze, to watch, to observe. And each moment brought so much so new so glorious. She felt the temptation to reach in. She grew attached to the characters, and mourned when they met untimely ends, She could change it, but She could not bring herself to. Yes, the temptation to effect was there, but the unfolding scenes paralyzed Her. It rose and crumbled with each tragedy and triumph of the world. And before She knew it, before She could blink (so to speak), it all ended. And began anew. Without her.