"Chronokinesis" By Mairin Weinandt (3rd Place Winner, Top of Iowa 9th/10th Grade - Prose)

Mairin Elizabeth Weinandt is a sophomore at Mankato East High School in Minnesota. She's on the varsity swim team at her school and has always dreamed of writing her own book, or short stories, and often fills her time with reading and writing her way through her life.

 It has been 3:36 am for one hundred and seventeen minutes.
 This is the reason they put me here all those years ago.
 They, however, would tell you I’m in here because I’m deranged. I have never been in agreement with their theory. Being deranged involves a lack of self awareness, I like to think I am all too aware of my being.
 Deranged. It's strange to know that the people around you think of you as crazy, think you don’t understand the world. I understand it to a level that would drive them truly deranged.
 I allow the clock to slip, the familiar and friendly buzz of my body as time continues on.
 3:37 am.
 One of them walks past my room, they trip over a crack in the old concrete floor.
 Trip. 3:37 am. Trip. 3:37 am. Trip. 3:37 am.
 They won’t know they tripped over and over and over. They never do. I will always know. The irony in it being that they think I have a lack of self while they have never known nor noticed the repetition occurring to them or right in front of them.
 Every day is the same as the last. Sitting on the dirty concrete where two of my four walls meet, wondering when they’ll realize that their construct of time means nothing. Future. Past. Present. Over, and over, and over. They put my love of repetition and consistency to shame.
 I wonder if they realize their future, past, and present means nothing, or if they realize their lives are barely a drop in the ocean that is the immense history of the Earth. The only real concept of time is a moment, a singular frame of the world, of life, if it came to a stop. If every living thing freezes in time as one, that is the only reality of time.
 I myself do not have the answer to the one topic I ponder most, my own reality.
 4:21 am.
 5:47 am.
 8:01 am.
 8:29 am.
 My boredom is part of the reason they call me deranged. My boredom of the one thing I always thought I loved, repetition. Eventually one comes to long the unexpected, the inconsistent, the personality of life itself. Sitting for hours becomes much more enjoyable when it lasts only minutes.
 They open my door twice within what they think to be twenty four hours, although I can’t remember the last time they opened my sweater. I always wondered why I could only wear my sweater with my arms hugging me. No one ever hugged me except myself.
 Clink.
 They open my door. They always look petrified when I turn my head to look over at them, so I don’t let them keep the expression on their faces for more than three ticks of the little hand on the clock hanging from the wall outside of my door. I never wanted them to fear me.
 8:34 am.
 Two of them slowly stalk toward me. Once one of them reaches me, they let my arms down from my sweater and hook their shaking hands under my left arm and force me to stand. The other grabs my right arm, and starts towards my door.
 The last time I passed that threshold was seventeen years ago. My heart slams rapidly inside my chest due to the lack of memory or knowledge of what would happen to me past that threshold.
 “Walk.” They command me, their voice sounding like a far off echo. I can’t get my feet to move forward or backwards or move at all.
 The two holding me up begin to walk forward, my bare feet tripping out from under me and dragging on the cold dirty ground.
 I get my feet back beneath me by the time we reach the threshold and with as deep a breath as I can push into my lungs, I step over the brink. I haven’t been over the threshold of my room since they locked me in. They always brought me anything I needed - food, clothes, and toiletries.
 The concrete is still cold and still as dirty, the only difference is the fluorescent lights swaying from the ceiling and the never ending hall. They pulled me to what I thought was the right, the edges of my vision blurring due to the overwhelmingness that is caused by being outside of the same four walls that have become so, so familiar. I don’t think the hall ever stops, door after door after door.
 We walk down the hallway that feels as though it will last till the final star in the sky burns out. We reach a wide staircase with the same migraine inducing fluorescent lights at the top of it leading to what is most likely another hall. Without warning, they begin the ascent up the stairs. I can’t remember the last time I lifted my feet this high. I’ve never had any reason to need to lift them. It's not as if they’ve ever let me out. Before now, that is.
 Step after step after step.
 8:38 am.
 When we breach the top of the staircase that feels as though it has taken a millennia, the life sucking fluorescent light flickers and I hear a low rumble that sounds as though it came from the core of the Earth herself roll through the hall. Flick.
 They yell next to me as the light flicks out one last time. They grab their black box from their hip and talk at it and listen as it talks back. The next moments are ones born to chaos and adrenaline themselves.
 8:39 am.
 The round glass lights over all of the doors glow red as the crescendo of buzzes rises, the sound of all hundreds of locks clicking open its finale.
Yells, bangs, shots, shrieks, footsteps, running– silence. Nothing moves, nothing breaths, nothing is given the time of day to think except for myself.
 8:39 am.
 Every single person who is pouring out of the doors is still, as if their existence has never been more than that of a statue’s. All of them running out in all different directions with a common look on their faces that can only be described as the look of pure determination and life.
 I’ve never seen this before. A new thought pops into my head. What if the outcome of this hasn't yet been forged into my fate?
 8:40 am.
 The noise of new found hope fills the halls as every being runs, for what I am not sure, but before I realize it my bare feet are walking, then they’re running, and then my chest is filled with an emotion I thought had died inside me long ago like many before it. Hope.
 I barely process what comes into my line of vision as I move with the mass of people. Stairs, halls, lights all blur together as my body does the one thing that feels right– Keep moving forward.
 8:56 am.
 The next thing I process is tile under my feet. It's cold like the concrete from my room, but smoother and far cleaner. Everyone is sprinting toward something on the far wall. It seems to glow brighter than the fluorescent lights that are so similar to those that hung outside of my room all these years. There must be yells erupting around me, but for some reason all I hear is a faint humming as my eyes are transfixed on the wall that all are running to.
 The wall comes closer and I realize that it is me who is moving toward the wall.
 8:59 am. Step after step after step. Closer and closer.
 I’m standing in front of two pieces of wood with holes of glass in them that shine into my face, obstructing any view I would have of what lay beyond.
 My hand connects with the cold silver handle and I pull.
 9:00 am.
 The door swings open and shows me what I thought to only be reality in the fields of unconsciousness.
 Just like every other time, I knew that this is the day I will inevitably die. This day has happened three hundred and forty seven times. Each of them a new attempt to see if my heart ceases its beating out of the terror of seeing what the world has now come to since the first time I walked through those doors.
 What I saw was not terrifying in the way that something is so joyous and overwhelming that there is a terror of its goodness being false, but in the way that the realization of those cold walls and dirty concrete were a better fate than the frigid barren wasteland humanity has brought upon this earth.
 That is the truest terror. That and the fear of not knowing what is inevitably to come once I step over the line. I could let the clock slip one final time and cross the line of mortality to find out what would become of my soul, my being, or I could continue this useless cycle repeatedly until my fate changes.
 Fate. Fate is another funny concept they seem to believe in. The belief that something higher, something stronger is controlling their narrative, writing their story, when in reality their lives are not even a blink in the eyes of the Earth and all she has seen.
 One blink, and I feel my final heartbeat ring as the clock slips.
 9:01 am.