I went through a time travel phase when I was in high school. Not in the sense that I was actually time traveling, but in that time travel was all I wanted to write.

If I’m being honest, a good chunk of that was because I had read and loved The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger and wanted to try my hand at it. It wasn’t just that her main character traveled in time but the way that impacted his relationship and shaped him as a person who constantly came unstuck in time. I wasn’t interested so much in seeing distant pasts or far-off futures as I was in how time changes us.

Except, I discovered, time travel was difficult to write. It needed rules, or it needed a blatant disregard for rules that could be made up for in cool factor. I wasn’t a skilled enough writer to handle that at the time, and I moved on to be infatuated with other tropes. And here I am, some ten or more years later, trying to write another short (hundred word short) story about time travel by neatly sidestepping the issue entirely.

So here’s a drabble.

AEVITERNITY

(Noun: from medieval Latin aeviternitās for eternity)

A midway point between chronological time and eternity; the state of being of angels and saints in Heaven.

William had saved for months for his wristwatch, its three hands made of real gold with a tiny diamond at the tip. He could hardly wait until he left the shop, furtively sneaking it out of his pocket and onto his wrist as if it had always been there, a marker of status.

And then William was hit by a truck.

He barely had time to wonder what had happened before he was elsewhere, somewhere with a choir and light and, thank heavens, his wristwatch. He looked down at it, admiring its craftsmanship, to find that the hands had stopped.