Dark Matters

Time-Slips. Magnetic Temporal Quantum Vortices. Hellacious, thieving abysses. Last I heard, there are 358 known natural occurrences of them on Earth.

Time-Slips are microcosms of extreme gravitational force with hyperactive time dilation, minus the spaghettification. Whatever that all means. They don’t know what causes them. Something about dark matter, and the speed of light. And collisions. All anyone really know for sure, is that inside a Time-Slip, time slows down, so that life around you can speed up. If you want to fast-forward through 24 hours of your life, all you need to do is stay inside a time-slip for 23 minutes and 11 seconds.

In the moment after you step into a Time-Slip, while you’re still holding your breath, you feel nothing. Sort of like floating, but you’re not in your body. Then it starts. The Pressure. Wave after wave of it, unchecked and unrelenting, crushing and pounding and pulverising you. And the entire time, you’re engulfed by unnerving, absolute silence.

I know, because I tried it once, to get out of an ancient history test. I lasted maybe half a minute before I lunged out, afraid I might already be dead. Ha. It didn’t occur to young, stupid me that I would just have to do the test the next day. Teachers were used to kids pulling those kinds of stunts. Trying out a Time-Slip is like a right-of-passage for kids around here. It’s pretty uncommon to have one in your neighbourhood. Maybe that’s why none of us thought to try and avoid things like history tests the way they do in the movies, by skipping out on school or hiding behind the art block.

Time-slipping isn’t just for dodging something you don’t want to do. There are easier ways to get out of things. No. Time-slipping is for escaping life completely. It consumes you so you cease to feel anything else, and then it lets you step back out just to prove that the world kept on spinning without you.

When the Time-Slips first started appearing, they tried to close them, but couldn’t figure out how. Apparently they’re still working on it, but they don’t really talk about it much anymore. The government, I mean. I guess they don’t want us to feel bad, or they don’t want to draw attention to time-slipping, or they don’t want people to start wondering why they haven’t been fixed yet. So, the Time-Slips are just there now. They try to block them off, enough at least to stop little kids from getting in, which would be all sorts of bad. But there’s nothing they can do to stop someone who needs that Time-Slip more than they’ve ever needed anything in their lives.

My mother was a Time-Slip regular. Other mothers scrolled through their feeds, or let the washing basket pile up for a week, or had a glass of wine to take the edge off. But I don’t think the edges were the problem for my mother. I’m not even sure there were any edges left, just an expansive haze of wretchedness.

I never knew quite what happened to her. She was anxious and bored and unhappy. Nothing in her life was ever enough. She loved us, I always knew that. But the love she gave was fragile. It was the brittle kind of love that could be irreparably damaged by the slightest movement in the wrong direction. And the love she accepted was apprehensive and impermanent, as though she never believed it could be anything more than hypothetical.

My father left before my sister was born. Maybe he didn’t want to deal with another kid, or maybe he knew that my mother couldn’t even deal with the one she already had. Either way, I don’t remember him. I remember sitting in front of the television. I remember eating dry cereal out of the box for dinner. I remember being alone, or with my sister. I remember the two of us creeping into my mother’s bed. I don’t remember my mother ever being in it. Even so, the sheets were sweet and soft and comforting, and I don’t remember ever wondering where she was.

There was nobody else around apart from my grandparents, who loved us but never came to see us. We visited them once a year, so they could give us the exact number of Christmas gifts necessary to suppress their guilt. The day was always strained and temporarily cordial, until my mother would storm out in a flurry of curse words and cheap brandy. My sister and I would scurry after her, begrudgingly leaving behind our gifts, and less begrudgingly, our grandparents.

I know there was more to my mother’s pain than the things I knew about. But I was a kid, so I mostly blamed myself. She was never a warm mother, or a helpful mother, or even a fun mother. She was dark and tormented and broken, and nothing like a mother should be. But she was my mother, and even if I was so used to her not being there that I didn’t miss her, I still loved her and craved her attention and wished she wouldn’t go.

Even when she was going to the Time-Slip most days, she would always be there in the morning when we woke up. She didn’t help us get ready, she just sat in the car, waiting to drive us to school in silence. Then, one day, out of nowhere, she started to pack our lunchboxes. She had this apple, and it was red and gleaming and perfect. But when she cut into it, she started screaming like she was on fire. Her heaving chest and shaking hands seemed irrepressible, and her eyes were brimming with desperate hopelessness as she stared at the rotten flesh of the apple, unable to move or speak or do anything to relieve the torment that was spilling from her body. After that we didn’t see her much at all.

When my sister was fourteen, she followed our mother into the Time-Slip. She lasted for a couple of breaths, emerging 45 minutes later, all crimson and panicked and choking on her anguish. She couldn’t understand how our mother chose to spend her time in the agony of the Time-Slip, her blistering need to escape us. But I knew it wasn’t really us she was escaping. Maybe she did do it for us. It would have been easier to understand if she was getting all messy and looped out on some concoction of uppers and downers. Or if she had run off with some low-life empty-promises good-for-nothing drop-kick of a guy.

I think it was the nothing she was chasing. And the speed at which she could pass her life by. She wanted to live, to see us grow up. She wanted to see who we would become, the shapes of our faces and the contours of our lives. But she couldn’t bear to live a second longer than was necessary to get there.

It’s not good for you, time-slipping that often. Humans weren’t designed to age a year in nine days. That’s probably why she avoided mirrors like they were about to detonate. Maybe they would have detonated something deep within her, allowing her to see the evidence of time etched into her face. To see the way her time-slipping had ravaged her body.

Some people go in and never come out. Maybe they stayed in there too long, and their bodies couldn’t hack it. Or they could never quite summon the resolve to step back out. They haven’t figured out how to retrieve someone from inside a Time-Slip. I guess it’s pretty low on their list of priorities. We don’t know for sure what happened to my mother, but nobody ever saw her come out. A part of me still thinks she’ll come home, even though it’s been a year and a half. That’s just over two weeks of time-slipping, which I know sounds crazy, but if anybody could survive in there, she could.

In a funny way, I think the Time-Slip somehow saved my mother from everything she kept inside. Everything that pushed violently against every ounce of her flesh, threatening to burst her open at any moment. The Time-Slip was the only thing that could contain it, the only way my mother could keep herself whole. And perhaps, one day, the pressure inside her was more than the Time-Slip could handle, and she burst into a billion pieces of dust. The beginnings of a brand new galaxy.