My heart did a stupid little jig. I’d wished for this a thousand times—more time, stolen time. And here it was.
I stepped back. The silence pressed in. I looked down the frozen train—at the upside-down newspaper, the swapped phone, the mustached baby. My little kingdom of stolen seconds. My stomach turned.
The coffee steamed. The man sneezed. The pigeon flew. The baby cried. And she looked up from her book, blinked at me across the aisle, and smiled—a small, private thing. She had no idea. None of them did. time-stop train ~freeze time and play naughty pranks!
This wasn’t a prank. This was something else. Something that didn’t have a funny punchline.
My hand stopped.
This was the real gift. Not the pranks. Her . Motionless, unaware, perfect.
But I knew. And I’d never un-know what I almost became when no one was watching. My heart did a stupid little jig
I noticed it first when my coffee stopped steaming. Not a gradual cooling—just a solid, glassy column of vapor hanging an inch above the rim. The man beside me on the platform was mid-sneeze, his face a hilarious contortion of pre-explosion. Behind him, a pigeon hung in the air like a feathered drone, one wing cocked.