On Monday mornings, I send out a story via email: ultra-brief tales of 1,000 words or more, usually in genres including horror, science fiction, and the supernatural. Those stories collectively are called Once Upon A Time. I’ve also published several ebooks and compendium volumes of those stories so far.

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Here's story 261, of 266 so far.

Doing Time

For the first part of my sentence, the doctor was with me. And for the last part.

When I was a young man, aggravated assault with intent wouldn’t have got you more than a few years, and you would probably have been out after two or three. They didn’t have the resources to make people serve their full sentences then; it was all too expensive. Prisons, heat, power, guards, food, medical treatment… the list goes on. All that stuff is gone now, and the sentences have become much harsher.

I put a man in intensive care for two weeks, and he was in recovery for another month. He’ll never walk normally again. My solicitor told the court it was a drunken disagreement that got out of hand. The judge virtually laughed at him. Truth is, that night I just wanted to hurt someone.

I was found guilty, of course, and I was sentenced to one hour at 175k.

It’s all approximate. Different people have different weights and metabolisms and blood chemistry, so the dose is always just a good estimate. You barely feel it going in. Just a regular syringe, into the shoulder. You’re in a chair, wearing your regular clothes, and the leg and arm restraints are for your own protection. They insisted that I go to the bathroom first, so I did. I’m glad I did. You wouldn’t want to have a full bladder the whole time.

The room was bright. I can describe every detail of it. Dimensions, flooring pattern, the colour of paint on the walls, and all the scuffs and marks. Every piece of furniture, which wasn’t much. The clock too. And the way it ticked.

I’d read about the drug before; everyone has. A complex molecule that does something to your basal ganglia and other parts of the brain. Very short-lasting, which is a cruel joke, and very safe. I felt nothing at first. The doctor checked my vital signs, said he’d be back in an hour, then he turned to walk away.

He was in the room with me for the next four months.

It’s a shock when your perception of time changes so drastically. At 175k, or 175,000 times slower than normal, every second seems to take about forty-eight hours. It was like the doctor, having already turned his back to me, froze in place. The clock froze. All sound didn’t cease; it just sort of became mashed down into an unintelligible rumble. It took the doctor less than ten seconds of real time to walk across the room to the door and then leave, but for me, it was four months — of exquisitely slow movement, noticeable only every day or so.

A sentence of one hour at 175k means twenty years. Your biological functions don’t change; no hunger or thirst since I’d eaten before they brought me in. No need to use the bathroom since they insisted I go earlier. No physical tiredness. The drug just makes your brain perceive each instant as a vast ocean of time, in a world slowed down to the point of absurdity. It’s a prison of solitary confinement within each moment.

I was in there for twenty years, all within an hour. At first, I tried to glance at the clock, and it took my eye muscles about a day and a half to accomplish the movement. Another two days to read the time. Then I closed my eyes, which I perceived as a gradual dimming to blackness over the course of about a day. It became oppressive, though, and then it took a further day to open my eyes again. Needless to say, speech or limb movement weren’t worth the effort — plus I was restrained, and there was nobody there.

The clock was the worst thing, I think. The second worst thing was the window that was to my right. I looked out of it once, sometime around year three, and then again when I’d served about fifteen years. The sun had only moved very slightly. I saw a woman with red shoes leaving her car the first time, and saw her returning to it the second time. Her errand, whatever it was, must only have taken half an hour. An incredible coincidence. I still think about her sometimes.

Isolation is the true horror, let me tell you. Trapped in a chair, within a room, alone, and held within aeons-long minutes. There’s a sense of the world leaving you behind, forgotten, even though you know that’s the very opposite of what’s happening. You know that when it all ends, only an hour of real time will have passed, and you’ll be a free man again. You know that it’s the same day — the same morning! You can even see that that’s the case. But it doesn’t feel that way.

I had so much time to consider my life. To feel fury about my punishment, and then grief, and then acceptance. To think about my crime, and why I committed it. It took about nine years alone — with the constant, long, slow sine-wave of the clock ticking; a day of sound and then a day of silence, for twenty whole years — before I started to understand where things had gone wrong in my childhood. How I’d responded, and compounded the problem. How I saw violence as retribution, and how I felt I was owed attention no matter what means I used to get it. Then there was a dead zone of a year or two. I just stopped thinking. But you can’t stop forever.

I think I went insane for a while. Maybe for six or eight months? I remember just silently screaming in my head for days and days and days. I remember wanting to die. I remember the fantasies of more violence, against the first person I’d see when it was all over. But that all faded, and the understanding came. By the time I was getting into the last few years of it, I was contrite and humbled.

Eventually, the doctor came back. He was very precise — I could see from the clock — and it took him another four months to move from the door over to where I sat. I felt amazed that it was the same man, who I’d not seen in more than nineteen years. Same clothes, even. I felt suddenly, desperately glad to see him. I felt that I might cry.

The drug doesn’t wear off quite as suddenly as it kicks in. I was glad of that. The last month of my sentence, or somewhere between five and fifteen seconds of real time, was a very gradual and then much more rapid acceleration. It was sickening, to be honest, but also exciting. I felt like I was being given a superpower, piece by piece and hour by hour. At the very end, I just sort of popped back into normal time. When the doctor released me from the restraints, I threw my arms around him and cried like a baby.

He told me not to be ashamed, because everyone did that.

A nurse took me out in a wheelchair, then helped me to start walking again. I was wobbly and awkward for the first minute, but I got the hang of it quickly enough. I just wanted to get home and lie down. I don’t remember much about the journey in the taxi.

And now I’m back in what you’d call normal time. Stuck again, but this time in a bizarre world of ultra-rapid movement, and a cacophony of sound and stimulus, with everything happening at once. I’ve started taking mild sedatives to help me cope. I tend to stay inside now, with the curtains drawn, and I just read. I can’t bear to watch TV.

I’ve taken all my mirrors down, and painted over any reflective surfaces. I keep some low background noise on all the time. And I try not to think. I try to stay in the slender shadow between the outside world and my own mind.

No matter how horrible the crime, there can be no worse punishment than spending a brief eternity alone with yourself.

JINX

KESTREL face a new and terrifying enemy: an all-seeing mastermind who already knows exactly who they are, and many of their deepest secrets. Nothing stays hidden forever, and the line between privacy and liberty is razor-thin…

Book 3 in the KESTREL action-thriller series.

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