Fifteen Seconds

                      (This Story Is Based On True Events.)                                                                                                                            

The seconds froze and slowly, imperceptibly, became minutes.

The minutes melted into hours.

The hours stood still. Then turned into days. Long grey aching days.

The days screamed inside my head before melting into weeks.

The weeks became months. But not until I’d begged for it to end.

Finally, it was a year.  A year on my dog eared calendar but half a lifetime inside my head.

A year of torture, longing for what had been lost, yet never existed.

Only now am I able to sit down and write this story.

To try and evict it from my soul and stop it sucking the life from my bones.

Here is that story. 

“My name is Martin Jackson. I am a thirty five year old architect running my own successful business.         I have a beautiful wife, Sarah, a teacher, whom I adore and she loves me back more than any man deserves. 

We are childhood sweethearts. From nursery, to school, to teenage jobs in fast food shops to getting married. We were never apart and never once wanted or needed anybody else. 

We have two happy, healthy, bright children. Harry, ten, who is football mad and Rose, six, who idolises a girl pop group whose name I can’t even pronounce.

We could be an advertisement for the perfect nuclear family. Happy, healthy, financially well off, regular holidays, and love each others company.

It sounds too good to be true.                                                    What follows is how it all went wrong. Weirdly, unbelievably, wrong.

It was the evening of May 11^th 1985. Or so I thought.  I was home alone, enjoying some ‘me’ time. Shoes off, feet up, a beer, junk food nibbles and a decent film on television.   Bliss.           My wife and kids had spent the day doing a sponsored cross country bike ride while I worked. They’d be home in an hour demanding their sponsorship money. As usual, I would play hard to get and they would play fight me until they got their money. Great fun.

The TV film was ok but not riveting. Just right for passing the time with your brain ‘switched off.’

  Sometime during the film, something caught my eye across the room.   This is where it all started going wrong.   My life would never be the same again.

There was a statue of a horse on a bookcase just in my peripheral vision. It was about five inches high and had stood there for years.  But something made me turn and look in that direction.

The statue was completely out of focus. Totally fuzzy, like an un-tuned tv screen.  I looked either side of the statue at a small vase to the right, then to a photo frame to the left. Both were perfectly in focus.             I looked back at the horse, it was still completely unfocused.  I looked around the room and everything was just as it should be. Nothing wrong, everything in focus. I looked back at the horse and it was definitely, badly out of focus.   

 By now, I’d lost all interest in the film. This ordinary statue of a horse had my brain working overtime trying to understand why it was out of focus with everything else in the room. I got up and nervously approached the statue as though it were an unexploded hand grenade. I waved my hand in front of it, trying to get some bearings on what was happening.   My hand was as solid as ever but the statue behind was like a shimmering figure appearing out of a fog.   I thought maybe my eyes were just not focusing properly after staring at the TV for an hour. I gave them a good rub with the back of my knuckles. It made no difference.  The horse looked like a hologram that wasn’t working properly.  I went to the kitchen and swilled my eyes with warm water.  When I returned to look at the statue once more, for the first time, I felt fear. Now it wasn’t just out of focus, it was lying on its side with its legs and head twisted at unnatural angles.    How ?         This was a heavy metal statue that I sometimes used as a paperweight.       

 My mind raced in several directions at once, confused and scared. I quickly looked around the room to see who could have had done this. It couldn’t possibly have happened on its own.   The room was empty.      I checked the hallway, half expecting to see the front door open and some joker running away, laughing. The door was shut tight and I was alone in the house.       I returned to the statue. It was still on its side and out of focus.     I gingerly went to pick it up, but as my hand approached, I felt pins and needles like an electric shock and sharply pulled my hand away.    I reversed back to the sofa and sat down without taking my eyes off the statue.

  There I sat, unable to remove my eyes from the twisted, fuzzy horse, trying to work out what was happening, even thinking that the horse might roll over and whinny. It must have been an hour later when the front door opened and the house filled with the noise of my family returning. Thank heavens, maybe my wife would see the obvious problem and solve it in a second.          The kids raced in, full of the day’s adventure and as expected, asking for their sponsorship money. But the usual fun and hijinks didn’t happen this time. My two lovely children stopped in their tracks and stared at me in confused silence.  Then my wife came in and stopped dead in her tracks, dropping her bags with a thump.                                      “What’s wrong Martin ?  You look awful.

What’s happened ?” the worry in her voice was like a punch in the stomach. I hated to do anything that upset her.  All I could do was point at the statue and mumble some nonsense about what had been happening.    She followed my pointing finger to look at the statue with a mixture of worry and confusion.  To her, the statue was as normal as ever. She quickly realised that whatever was wrong with me was not for two young children to witness. 

They were rushed off to bed and told that daddy would be fine in the morning. 

  That was the last time I ever saw them.  My beautiful children would never be a part of my life again.

My wife tenderly ushered me upstairs and put me to bed like an elderly, infirm relative.      On the way, I caught sight of myself in the hallway mirror.   I was as white as a ghost with red eyes like saucers.     I looked like I’d aged thirty years.

I think I slept for a short while. I really can’t be sure. It may have been minutes. It may have been hours.  I may not have slept at all. My mind was obsessed with that damned statue.    

Sometime in the night, I could lie there no longer.  I got up and went downstairs in the dark, without even getting dressed. I had to check on the statue.  I was like a pin drawn by a magnet. 

    Somewhere inside my fuddled brain, I was hoping that everything would be back to normal. The statue would be standing upright in perfect focus. Then I could take a deep breath, go back to bed, and life would return to normal.    No such luck.   A stab of horror like a lightning bolt rushed through my body when I saw that nothing had changed.     The horse was still on its side, twisted and wildly out of focus.    I sat on the sofa and stared.  And stared. And stared.

Praying for this stupid little statue of a horse, to return to normal.   Wishing it would just go back to being insignificant, being walked past and ignored many times a day.  Just like all the years we’d owned it. 

 It must have been several hours later when the house started coming to life. Noises of awakening from upstairs.  Then the sound of my wife urgently calling my name.   Footsteps hurrying downstairs followed by the inevitable inquest. 

“What on Earth are you doing Martin ?  How long have you been here like this ?”  

 I just stared in silence at the horse.  “What’s wrong ?Silence. Eventually, a question I couldn’t ignore.  

 “What about work ?” asked Sarah.  I forced myself to respond, trying to ease my wife’s worry. But my response was a lie.  “I’ll work from home today.”  “Right.” said Sarah. “I’ll take the children straight to school and I’ll call you later.”    No reply.   “Ok ?”  Sarah forced a reply.        “Ok. You go. I’ll be fine.” I lied again. I knew I would not be fine. Far from it.  Sarah threw a worried glance at Martin, then a puzzled glance at the statue, which looked normal to her, then she left Martin to ‘work from home.’ The children were hurried out of the front door without breakfast and told daddy needed to be alone for a while.  

   My eyes didn’t leave the horse for a second. Several times during the course of the day, the horse righted itself and stood, as it should on its four legs, before returning to its side, twisted and deformed. Each time, I forced myself to approach the statue and try to take hold of it. Each time the severe pins and needles forced me to retreat back to the sofa.    During the day, the phone rang several times, but went unanswered.   Sarah arranged for a friend to collect the children from school and take them home with her. She didn’t want them seeing their father again in the state he was last night. The unanswered phone had made her fear the worst. She left work early and raced home, worried and scared by what she might find.

She was right to be worried. I was worse than the previous evening.   Much, much, worse.     I was totally unresponsive to her worried questions.  Even her gentle caressing of my brow didn’t move me.      I just stared, fixated on the statue. I’d had almost become a statue myself.    Sarah had seen enough.   She called an ambulance and told them to hurry, her husband was having a stroke or a fit of some kind.

   It took about fifteen minutes for the ambulance to arrive. From this moment on, I would never see my wife again, nor my children, nor this room or this home.  Everything I’d known all my life, friends, family, work, my entire life, would exist no more.   

The blue flashing light and siren of the ambulance had a startling effect on me.   Suddenly, my head began to pound with excruciating pain.  The statue and the room began to fade. Everything slowly slid into darkness.       Everything disappeared except the dreadful, thumping pain in my head.                                                               

Then, slowly, I heard distant voices. Panic and screaming.   Shouts of, ‘make way.’ ‘Let me through.’

I felt something on my chest. First cold, then pain.   Extreme pain that made my entire body convulse.          

I forced my eyes open to try and see what was happening. 

 Above me, where I lay on the grass was a man holding a defibrillator to my chest.  “He’s back. We’ve got him.” shouted a man, wearing rugby kit.    “Thank God.” came cries from a crowd of teenage boys looking down at me on the floor.  I took a deep gasp and looked around. Where on Earth was I ?  Where had my house gone ?  Where was my wife ?  Where was that statue ?  Who were all these people ?   A young boy, maybe seventeen, leaned in close and took my hand. “Welcome back David, we thought we’d lost you.”   “David ?  Who the hell is David ?”  My confusion was growing by the second.   “Where am I ?”  The seventeen year old’s answer caused more confusion. “You’re on the school sports field David.  Don’t you remember ?  We were playing rugby and that big oaf Peter Willis slammed you to the ground.  You were knocked unconscious.  “I’ve never played rugby in my life.”  I slurred groggily.  “You’re our star player David.  You’re the under eighteens champion.”  You’ll be right as rain soon. You must have been out for almost fifteen seconds.

“But where’s my wife ? My children ?”    

 Laughter from the crowd of boys in their sports gear.        

 “Wife and kids ? You haven’t even got a girlfriend David.” 

So that is my story.  I closed my eyes in 1985 on a gloriously happy life. I had a wife and children that I adored, a lovely home and a successful business.   

When my eyes opened, I was a seventeen year old schoolboy in 2024, surrounded by strangers. I was yet to pass my final exams and hadn’t even had a serious girlfriend.  I was taken ‘home’ that evening to a strange house with strangers for parents who treated me, a grown family man, like a teenager. For that is what I am in this strange new world.   It seems that in the fifteen seconds I was unconscious, my brain constructed an entire lifetime that never really existed.                    

 My ‘new’ friends thought it was hilarious that I’d imagined being a married father.  I didn’t find it amusing at all. I wanted my old life back.    I wanted my family back.   I wanted my real life back.    

 The pain of losing them was unbearably real.   Every second since, has been a deep black hole of bereavement, but without anyone to grieve over and nobody who believed my grief.           

 I swear, I would make a deal with the devil this instant to return to my old life.  How can I live in the body of a seventeen year old boy when I know I am a grown man with a family.                         

 In my head at least.

Do you think my story is weird ?   Wait.  It gets weirder still.   

 The overwhelming urge to return to being Martin Jackson, to reconnect with my lost life, led me to search for my old name.     The internet miracle didn’t exist when I closed my eyes in 1985.   It’s a miracle that has drawbacks.  You never know what you’ll find.  Sure enough, I did find Martin Jackson.  It didn’t take long, I didn’t have far to look.    He lived ten minutes from where I was knocked unconscious.     He attended the same school as me. 

The one where my rugby accident happened.   He had a wife called Sarah and two children, Harry and Rose. He was an architect with his own business.       

There are pictures to go with this information.  So far, I haven’t dared look. What if they are the wife and children I ache to be with again ?   What if it is me in the photos with them ?               

 I don’t think I could stop myself returning to them.   How ?    That brings me to the final, bitterest twist that tears at my soul ?

The family were all killed in a car crash.  Their car hit a runaway horse.    On May 11^th 1985.

End.