On Tuesday morning, Time got the hiccups. Not your ordinary, drink-some-water-upside-down hiccups. These were cosmic hiccups that made minutes skip like scratched vinyl and hours fold into origami swans.
I first noticed it when my coffee mug refilled itself three times during one sip. The liquid would drain, then hiccup – full again, steam pirouetting above the rim. My watch started running backwards, then sideways, then in figure eights.
Outside my window, a jogger got stuck in a temporal loop, perpetually passing the same fire hydrant while her ponytail swished in perfect metronome. The hydrant, apparently bored with its static existence, began sprouting daisies that aged from bud to bloom to dust in seconds.
My neighbor Fred was particularly upset because he kept arriving at work on Thursday when he’d left his house on Monday. His boss was not amused by his “time has hiccups” excuse, especially since the boss was simultaneously experiencing last Wednesday and next Tuesday.
The local weatherman attempted to give the forecast but could only report that it was “partially cloudy with a 60% chance of yesterday” and “temperatures ranging from August to Medieval Times.” Birds flew backwards. Traffic lights played Simon Says. Seasons began square-dancing with each other.
Scientists blamed it on a cosmic case of indigestion after Time accidentally swallowed a black hole. Alternative medicine practitioners recommended holding Time’s breath and drinking water from the far side of the moon. Philosophy professors just smiled knowingly and said “Time is relative” before disappearing in puffs of existential smoke.
The hiccups lasted for what might have been three days or seventeen centuries – it was hard to tell since calendars had turned into möbius strips. When they finally stopped, Time had to take a lengthy sabbatical to sort itself out. This explains why 2024 feels like it’s simultaneously crawling and sprinting.
They say Time heals all wounds, but nobody ever asks who heals Time’s wounds. These days, I keep a spare temporal butterfly bandage in my pocket, just in case the hiccups return. And sometimes, on particularly peculiar mornings, I swear I can hear the universe practicing its scales: hic – Monday – hic – Thursday – hic – Renaissance.
The jogger still passes my house, though now she runs in quantum superposition, simultaneously arriving and departing, her ponytail a probability wave of infinite possibilities. The fire hydrant hasn’t sprouted any more daisies, but sometimes it hums show tunes from musicals that haven’t been written yet.
As for Fred, he finally solved his commuting problem by accepting a job as a time zone taste-tester. Last I heard, he was sampling minutes from various epochs to ensure their vintage and bouquet meet temporal standards. He says the Renaissance had notes of oil paint and enlightenment, while the Jurassic period was a bit too heavy on the meteor finish.
I’ve learned to keep an emergency kit ready: one paradox resolver, a pair of temporal stabilizers, and a bottle of carbonated eternities – you know, just in case Time gets the sneezes next. After all, in a universe where Time itself can get the hiccups, it’s best to expect the unexpected, even if it already happened tomorrow.
P.S. – If you’re reading this last paragraph first, blame it on the residual hiccups. Time still hasn’t quite gotten its rhythm back, and sometimes paragraphs like to play musical chairs when nobody’s looking.
Dana Wall's career spans two seemingly disparate worlds: the precision of corporate finance and the boundless realm of speculative fiction. After earning her CPA and MBA, she spent twenty years navigating the complex financial landscapes of the entertainment industry, serving as CFO at Granderson Des Rochers Entertainment Law Firm, Accounting Manager at ICM Partners, and Financial Controller at Bully Pictures. During those years of reconciling balance sheets and analyzing profit margins, she discovered that numbers tell stories of their own—stories of ambition, transformation, and the fluid nature of time itself. In 2020, Wall completed her MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College, where she began exploring how her unique perspective from the entertainment industry's financial sector could inform her literary work. Her writing often plays with time, structure, and the intersection of the mundane and fantastic, drawing surprising parallels between corporate precision and creative chaos. She lives in Manhattan Beach, CA, where she continues to balance spreadsheets by day while crafting stories that bend the laws of physics by night.