Wonder Made

Seventeen, Part One

•••

Humans swim around in the cosmic fishbowl known as Earth. You blink out of existence faster than a strand of Christmas lights circa 1986, and while you muck around, indecisive on how you want your lattes, your memories lose their edge.

They soften and dull and fade until you forget the things that were essential in making you, you. You allow parts of yourself to feed Time, who, as you might recall, has been referred to as a bit of a douche. By no means is this an exaggeration. Time, much like one's Uncle Bennie, can leave everyone repulsed and confounded.

However, unlike Uncle Bennie, Time also knows how to read a room; it can sense people's waning disinterest. This ability allows Time to demonstrate compassion when it so chooses.

Now Time has come across a moment where it does not know what to do. With its hands shoved in its temporal pockets, it pauses, lingers. Unsure if it should move on. It has never felt awkwardness, until now.

Peneloper gazes into the eyes of a ghost, but he is as real and concrete as herself. Flesh and blood and bone. Smelling as he always had, trying to smile as he always had, but faltering because, like Time, Rayburn Auttsley does not know what to do.

Peneloper tries and fails, but being our heroine, tries again, only to fail again, at coming to terms with her father's liveliness. Though others fill the room, all as equally uncomfortable in the space except for Welda, who leans over, tongue-wagging, savoring the collective discomfort floating through the air, we do not matter.

It is Peneloper and Rayburn, daughter and father, trapped in this second with no end in sight.

He's alive, she thinks. She does not call him by name, and she does her best to resist falling into the arms that had always provided her comfort when she sought them out. Peneloper is a united front of anger and bitterness and resentment.

Her father is alive.

And then, more solemnly she thinks, is it for the best that he is alive?

The seconds waste away. Minutes solidify into glass sheets that shatter. Words are swallowed back, not a breath is inhaled. They are simply two people frozen alongside Time.

The seemingly young leader of the Council, a one Kelpner Finn, a dashing, shining example of Crows, steps in to assist his old friend Time by breaking the proverbial ice.

He is careful not to break the literal ice, which earlier on in his career resulted in a few thousand prehistoric men and fuzzy elephants becoming the highly sought after prizes of future archaeological digs.

Kelpner decides to tell her of her family's misfortune, which like most tragedies, centered around an office romance.

• Where the Sour Turns to Sweet •

"Mildrea Auttsley's actions broke the world, Miss Auttsley," Kelpner Finn said.