Disastrous

Introduction

Time pulsed in a place like this.

You can feel it in the air, see it on all our faces; we are as one. Our hearts all beat at the same rate and every day we do exactly as we did yesterday. The old man, who lives in the yellow house, has been sitting on his porch steps, bullshitting with his friends, just as he did 50 years ago when he was 13. The woman who lives next door gets up every morning and puts on a black dress and walks herself down to the corner cafe - shes been doing that since she was 22 when her father told her that black was her color.

Even the seasons conformed to our strict ticking of time. The snow fell on November 1st and it didnt let up until March 1st. Spring started then; on the first of June, the sun beat down on us till were all burnt. Fall came when September hit, and so on, year after year. Everyone here found solace in the fact that nothing ever changed. No one was aware that we had been breached. She was a chameleon; her camouflage was extraordinary. It was June 7th when she arrived, and that day now goes down in history as The Day Time was Destroyed.

I had woken up at 8, watched Mrs. O'Connor march herself down the street in her black dress, despite the sweltering heat, then changed into my plain white T-shirt and my oil-stained jeans. I grabbed an apple and hopped into my old 1990 Ford F-150. The radio station never changed from the classic rock station; you could try but the dial wouldnt budge; I didn't mind. I drove the backroads, waving to Mr. Klutz, who had been sitting on his porch step since 4 am. It took 15 minutes of country land to get to Bo's Garage. Never more, never less.

I started to work on Bo's 1978 Benz hes been fixing up since he bought it. We tended to work harder on his car than the others in the garage, which is why they were always here. We never thought about changing the way we worked, because no one cared that we had them. It was normal. Out of nowhere though, a sound, about as loud as the firework display we had every fourth of July, rang through the air. Bo and I looked at each other, wiped our hands on our jeans and walked out of the garage. Barreling down the road, came a truck, every minute or two, making the same ear-splitting noise we had heard before.

"Theres a-sumpthin' wrong with that there uh-truck, don'tcha think?" Bo inquired, not taking his eyes off the truck when speaking to me.

"You're right," I replied, watching it too. "It has to be going a hundred." And it was. The truck, which we later would learn, had blown out breaks and a gas problem, which was the noise we had heard. That was not the significant part of the unexpected truck coming into our never-changing town. The aspect of the truck that brought our town crashing down to its foundation, was the extraordinary woman who drove it there.