Time Curved

Time shifted like silk through a broken hourglass, and Edna found herself barefoot in dew-soaked grass. The air tasted of clover and milkweed, and morning swallows stitched ribbons through the pale sky. She hummed a childish tune—one she had not heard in eighty long years—yet the melody rose from her without effort, bright and sure as spring.

The cows watched her with calm, moon-wide eyes, their bells chiming softly as they chewed, indifferent to the slowness of time. Edna spun in a circle, arms flung wide, hair tangled with sunlight. There was no wheelchair, no brittle bones, no trembling hands clutching the present. Only a body that belonged to summer, and a world that still believed she had all her years ahead of her.

She planned her day with fervor: a trek to the creek to hunt polished stones; a secret meeting with the neighborhood boy who kept marbles in his pocket; a story to tell her mother at dinner—about the turtle she found or the cloud shaped like a galleon. Tomorrow she would build a castle of hay bales in the barn, and make it her kingdom.

The horizon glimmered, not with neon or city smog, but with that particular gold that only childhood remembers. Time curved. Birds argued. Wind braided her hair. Everything was simple and unbroken.

But the moment was a soap bubble—radiant, fragile, doomed to burst. Already the farm’s edges flickered, as if someone were turning down the world’s opacity. Crows lost their outlines. The fences dissolved into brightness. Even the cows became brushstrokes in watercolor, blurring into a childhood memory she once believed would last forever.

Edna did not notice at first. She was too busy singing, too busy believing she was still real here on the sunlit farm. Yet the field trembled, and she felt a tug, as though a distant window were calling her back.

The girl she was slowed, the song catching in her throat.

“This too will pass,” whispered the wind, in the voice of the woman she would become.

And as the vision thinned, the young Edna held her breath—trying to stay, trying to linger, trying to live one more hour in a day long vanished—before the farm faded to light, and light to memory, and memory back to the cold hush of the present waiting for her return.