Behind You

Behind you, you hear someone sneeze. In the window of the building across the street you see a man sneeze. The sounds sync perfectly. For a moment, just a few fractions of a second, time stops. You, the man across the street, and the sneezer in your building, you are all frozen. And then life starts again. Time keeps moving. You’re not sure it ever happened. You’re certainly not going to ask Dennis from accounts, when he puts away his handkerchief, if time seemed to stop for him for just a moment, right after he sneezed. That’s the kind of thing that earns you funny looks in the office. It certainly won’t get you invited to the pub for a drink on Friday night. And you want this job to work out. This time, you want people to like you, not think of you as the strange girl with too many bangles who says weird things. You promised yourself that this job was going to be different. You weren’t going to have to explain that it seemed weird to you too, because you weren’t going to bring things like this up in the first place. But this, this can’t go without remarking, surely. How could you let this go? Dennis must be thinking the same thing at the moment, well, if not the exact same thing then something along the same lines, but obviously an internal narrative more specific to Dennis and his particular circumstances. But he’s got to be wondering about what just happened. “Dennis, did you just notice that? Right after you sneezed, time seemed to stand still, just for a second…”

Dennis just looks at you. His eyes look frightened, but the rest of his face is impassive…