How It Started

The power arrived on a Wednesday, which was an ordinary day in every other respect.

Eli was walking home from school along the cut-through behind the library when he heard the sound. A sharp crack, the kind that happens when something heavy falls from a height. He looked up just in time to see a large flowerpot tipping off the ledge of a window three floors above him, falling directly toward a woman walking below who had not noticed and was looking at her phone.

He had no time to shout. No time to run forward. No time to do anything at all.

He felt something happen in his chest. Not painful. More like a click, the way a door sounds when it latches properly. And then the world went backward.

Not far. Not far at all. The flowerpot unfelll. The crack unsounded. The woman took back three steps. The whole world rewound ten seconds exactly, and then started forward again.

This time Eli shouted. "Hey! Move!"

The woman looked up from her phone, startled, and stepped sideways. The flowerpot hit the pavement where she had been standing and shattered into pieces.

The woman stared at the shards. Then she looked at Eli. "How did you know?" she asked.

"I just saw it falling," he said, which was true in a way that also left out everything important.

She thanked him and walked on quickly, still looking shaken. Eli stood among the broken pottery and the spilled soil and tried to work out what had just happened to him.

He picked up one of the larger pieces of broken pottery and turned it over in his hands. The soil from the plant was still damp. He set it back down and stood up straight and walked home without looking back.

He went home and sat on his bed and thought about it very carefully for a long time. He was twelve years old and methodical and not given to panicking, which served him well now. He made a list in his head of what he knew.

One. He had rewound time.

Two. He had not chosen to do it. It had happened in response to something, the moment before the woman was about to be hurt.

Three. It had been exactly ten seconds. He was certain of the ten seconds because he had a very precise internal sense of time, which his mother called a gift and his teachers called useful when he paced himself in timed tests.

Four. Nobody else had seemed to notice. The woman had had no memory of the first version of events. The world had simply restarted and only Eli carried the knowledge of what had happened before.

He thought about this for a long time.

Then he went downstairs for dinner and said nothing about it to anyone, which was not a decision he made consciously but which felt, instinctively, like the right one for now.

He needed to understand it better first.