8:13 PM Forever
Would you stay in a world where time doesn't exist, just to avoid the mistakes you're destined to make?
By the time Ava notices the silence, it’s already too late to pretend it’s anything ordinary.
The café around her is full. Every table taken, every chair at least half-claimed, mugs sweating rings onto wooden surfaces, laptops open like waiting mouths. Outside, the city glows with the reflected neon of a Friday night, cabs and bikes and impatient pedestrians.
Inside, everyone is frozen.
Not just still—frozen. Mid-sip, mid-word, mid-scroll. A barista holds a milk jug in a perpetual graceful arc over a cup, white foam suspended in midair like a soft sculpture. A couple in the corner are tilted toward each other, mouths parted as if caught on the same breath. A child by the door has one hand outstretched toward a cookie sample, eyes bright and unblinking.
The only sound is the hum of the refrigerator and the faint buzz of the lights.
“Hello?” Ava says, because it’s what you’re supposed to say when the world stops.
No one answers.
She stands slowly, her chair scraping a loud scar across the concrete floor. No one flinches. Her pulse climbs into her throat.
The barista’s eyes are wide, lashes casting faint shadows on his cheeks. She waves a hand in front of his face. Nothing. His chest doesn’t move. She can’t even see the tiny flutter of breath at his nostrils.
“Okay,” she whispers to herself. “Okay.”
A phone on the nearest table is frozen mid-notification, the screen stuck between one frame and the next, a ghost of a message visible and unreadable. The second hand on the clock above the counter points at the three and does not tick forward.
It’s 8:13 PM forever.
She pushes open the café door. The bell above it gives a half-hearted jingle and then cuts off, sound sheared in half.
Outside, the city has become a photograph.
Cars sit at odd angles in the intersection, headlights burning steady, drivers slumped over steering wheels or straight-backed in their seats, gazes fixed on the middle distance. A bicyclist hangs in the air, wheels inches off the ground, body pitched forward as if about to fall—and never finishing.
The air itself feels thick, like stepping into a room full of steam that never quite touches her skin.
“Hello?” she tries again, louder. “Is this a—prank? Am I on some kind of—”
The only answer is the steady, indifferent glow of the traffic lights. They are all green.
She walks.
Her footsteps sound too loud on the pavement, each impact a punctuation mark in a sentence no one else is reading. Pigeons dot the sidewalks like punctuation marks of their own, wings spread mid-flap, frozen inches off the ground. One hangs in front of her face, a gray blur suspended in the air, its eye a dark marble.
“Sorry,” she mutters, ducking under it. “Excuse me.”
Somewhere between the second and third block, where the streetlights thin and the storefronts become more shuttered than open, she starts to think about dreams.
You’ve had this one before, she tells herself, half-desperate. The dream where you’re the only one left. The empty city, the humming sky. Any second now you’re going to wake up in bed, heart pounding, and you’ll laugh about how real it felt.
She reaches up and pinches the soft flesh inside her elbow until tears spring to her eyes.
Nothing changes.
The world stays pinned.
At the corner of Seventh and Lark, a bus has stopped mid-turn, wheels locked in a slow, impossible climb over the curb. Through the window, a dozen faces sit in perfect tableau. A woman with earbuds dangling from one ear, head tilted toward the window. A teenage boy halfway through rolling his eyes, mouth twisted. A man with his forehead pressed to the glass, eyes closed.
A birthday cake rests on the bus driver’s lap.
It’s absurdly domestic—a round thing in a flimsy plastic container, white icing swirled into peaks, candles standing at attention, wicks unburned. Someone has piped “HAPPY 40TH DAD!” in shaky blue letters that tilt downhill.
The driver’s hands rest on either side of it like parentheses. He’s smiling slightly, as if he can already hear someone singing.
Ava presses her hand to the glass. It’s cool against her palm.
“Did you get to blow out your candles?” she asks softly. “I hope… I hope it was good. When it happens.”
She takes a breath.
The air smells faintly of exhaust and sugar.
“You’re dreaming,” she tells herself. “You are absolutely dreaming.”
“You’re not.”
The voice comes from behind her.
She spins so fast she nearly loses her footing.
A man stands in the street a few feet away, hands shoved deep into the pockets of a too-thin jacket. His hair is a dark, tangled halo around his face, a curl falling over one eye. He looks about her age, maybe a little older. Not frozen. Not pinned.
Breathing.
His chest rises and falls faster than he probably wants it to, and she can hear her own breath matching his, two metronomes ticking in sync.
“You’re not dreaming,” he says again, more gently. “I checked.”
A strange laugh escapes her, half hysterical, half relieved.
“What do you mean, you ‘checked’?” she demands. “How do you check something like that?”
He glances up at the sky as if considering.
“I tried all the usual stuff,” he says. “Pinching, slapping myself, jumping off a low wall to see if I’d fall weird. I didn’t. I just bruised my ass.” He shrugs. “Feels pretty real to me.”
She stares at him.
“You’re the first person I’ve seen moving,” she says.
He nods. “You’re the first person I’ve seen, period.”
They look at each other for a moment, two small moving pieces in an enormous, stuck machine.
“I’m Jonas,” he offers, after the silence tightens.
“Ava.” Her voice sounds strange to her own ears, like she’s saying someone else’s name. “So… you, uh. You come here often?”
He huffs out a laugh, quick and bright in the heavy air.
“Only when time collapses and the city falls into a supernatural coma,” he says. “Which, full disclosure, is new.”
Something in her unclenches.
She shouldn’t trust him. She knows that. Being the last two awake doesn’t automatically make someone safe. But the alternative is being alone in this frozen diorama, talking to birthday cakes and pigeons.
“Where were you?” she asks. “When it… started?”
He gestures vaguely uptown. “My apartment. I was in bed.”
“Sleeping?”
He hesitates. His gaze flickers away, toward the dark mouth of an alley, as if there’s something there only he can see.
“Not yet,” he says.
There’s something in the way he says it—a hollow at the core of the words—that makes her want to change the subject.
“Everyone else is like this?” she asks instead. “Everywhere?”
“Everywhere I walked,” he says. “I came from Riverside. It’s the same up there. Dogs, too, by the way. And—uh—birds.” He jerks his chin toward the suspended pigeon. “Seems like we got the two-person upgrade.”
“Lucky us,” she mutters.
They stand in the middle of the intersection as if the rules of traffic no longer apply. They don’t.
“So what do we do?” she asks.
He looks surprised, as if no one has asked him that before. Which, of course, no one has.
“I’ve been… wandering,” he admits. “Trying to see if there’s some kind of pattern. Or a big red button that says RESET.”
“And?”
“And mostly I’ve just learned that people leave a lot of interesting stuff half-finished.”
They start to walk.
They don’t say “let’s stick together,” but they do. It feels inevitable, like stepping into a river and being swept by a current they didn’t know was there.
They pass an open laundromat where shirts hang limp in mid-spin behind foggy glass. An apartment window where an unfinished painting leans against an easel, the outline of a woman’s face sketched in charcoal, the eyes left blank. A street vendor’s cart where a hot dog is caught mid-arc between tongs and bun, a smear of mustard hovering in the air like a tiny yellow comet.
“You were right,” Ava says quietly. “About people leaving things half-finished.”
Jonas snorts. “Told you. Human specialty.”
They find a park where a group of friends is frozen around a picnic blanket, cups raised, someone halfway through smashing a strawberry into someone else’s face. Glitter hangs in the air above them, a burst of gold arrested mid-shimmer.
“Graduation,” Jonas says, nodding at the caps tossed into the air and held there, mid-flight. “That’s brutal.”
He walks among them, careful not to touch. On the picnic blanket, someone’s phone lies facedown. He picks it up and flips it over.
The screen shows a half-sent text.
can’t wait to see u. i think tonight i’ll finally—
The text bar blinks on an invisible cursor and then stops, halfway through the next blink.
“Finally what?” Ava murmurs.
“Confess undying love,” Jonas suggests.
“Or finally tell them it’s over.”
“Oof.” He winces. “Yeah. That too.”
They put the phone back carefully, like replacing a relic in a museum.
On a side street, they pass a tiny ground-floor studio where the door stands ajar. Inside, canvases line the walls, explosions of color and shape. One sits on an easel, a smear of late-afternoon light captured in oils. A paintbrush hangs in the air inches away from the canvas, a droplet of blue about to fall and never landing.
Ava steps in, drawn by the smell of turpentine and stories.
A woman stands in front of the canvas, arm extended, eyes narrowed in concentration, hair pulled back into a messy knot. Paint speckles the back of her hand, her cheek, the collar of her shirt. She looks so alive, so intent, that Ava’s brain keeps trying to animate her.
“What do you think she was trying to fix?” Ava asks, nodding at the canvas.
“The blue,” Jonas says. “We always think we can get the blue right if we just try one more stroke.”
“You sound like you know that firsthand.”
He shrugs. “I write music. Badly. Same thing. Different medium.”
“That’s not how that works,” she says, but she smiles.
He smiles back.
It hits her then: She is walking through other people’s lives with a stranger, piecing together their stories from crumbs and half-sentences and the angle of their frozen hands, and it is both deeply intrusive and oddly sacred.
“We shouldn’t be in here,” she says suddenly, guilty.
“We’re not hurting anything,” he says. “Time’s already… whatever this is.”
He taps the air. It feels like nothing.
“Besides,” he adds, softer, “she’ll never know.”
“Maybe she will,” Ava says. “When she wakes up.”
He doesn’t answer that.
They keep moving.
In a brownstone stoop half a neighborhood away, they find a man asleep with a book open on his chest, glasses sliding down his nose. The title is something dense about astrophysics, the chapter dog-eared in the middle.
“How long do you think he’s been working on that?” Jonas wonders.
“His whole life,” Ava says. “Probably.”
They peer at the margin notes. Tiny, tight writing snakes between printed lines. Some are equations. Some are things like: ask Ellie about this. Some are just question marks.
In a third-floor walk-up above a bodega, they find a child’s birthday party frozen at the moment when someone turned out the lights. The cake glows with candles. A dozen small faces are filled with the same expression: the anticipatory joy of being allowed to make a wish.
“How many people do you think wished for something like this?” Ava asks. “To stop time. To have the world to themselves for a while.”
“More than a few,” Jonas says. “I probably did, at some point. College finals week, at least.”
“And now?” she asks.
He looks up at the child with the cheeks puffed, ready to blow.
“Now it feels like cheating,” he says.
They discover quickly that doors aren’t really doors anymore. Everything yields to them. Locks slide open, or maybe have never been locked. Password screens reset themselves at their touch. The world has become an exhibit curated for exactly two visitors.
Ava feels worse about it than Jonas does, at first. But the more they walk, the more each frozen tableau starts to feel like a kind of invitation. Look. This is what we cared about, before. This is what we were in the middle of.
It doesn’t take that long—the first day? the second? time has become meaningless—for them to start sharing more than observations.
“Tell me a secret,” Jonas says, somewhere around what would have been midnight. They are sitting in the middle of an empty crosswalk, backs against the cool metal of a delivery truck.
“No,” she says automatically.
“We’re literally in a city-wide coma,” he points out. “If there was ever a time.”
She picks at a crack in the yellow paint.
“I was supposed to move to Berlin two years ago,” she says finally. “Job fell through. Or I chickened out. Depends on who you ask.”
“Who do you ask?” he asks.
She thinks about the packed suitcase she never unpacked all the way, her passport tucked into the back of a drawer like a pressed flower.
“Depends on the day,” she admits.
He nods, gaze fixed on some middle distance. “I was supposed to be on tour right now,” he offers. “Small one. Midwest dive bars. Nothing glamorous. I canceled.”
“Why?”
“Stage fright. And… other stuff.”
“Other stuff,” she echoes. “Vague. Suspicious.”
He laughs, but there’s no humor in it.
A silence pools between them, not uncomfortable, exactly. Heavy.
“What about you?” she asks. “Tell me something you didn’t do.”
He pushes his hair back, sighing.
“I didn’t answer my brother’s last text,” he says. “He wanted to meet up. I put it off. You know how it is, you think you’ve got time. That was… a while ago.” He shrugs. “We haven’t talked since.”
She doesn’t say she does know. That she has a similar text from an ex-friend sitting unanswered in her own phone, the words “we should catch up” incriminating and simple and terrifying.
Instead, she bumps her shoulder against his.
“Time’s weird now,” she says. “Maybe that means you still could. When… this stops.”
“If it stops,” he says.
They don’t talk about that part much.
Because between the bus with the birthday cake and the frozen graduation, between the half-sent texts and the unfinished paintings, another pattern has begun to emerge.
The dream.
It starts the first time they fall asleep.
They don’t mean to. They’ve been walking for what feels like days, adrenaline carried them for a while, but eventually their bodies insist. Exhaustion drags them down onto the plush carpet of a luxury hotel lobby, heads pillowed on their arms like kids on a field trip.
The city around them is as still as ever. The chandelier above their heads dangles a thousand crystals in perfect stillness.
The moment Ava’s eyes close, she is somewhere else.
The dream is always the same.
A river. Or something like one. A wide, shimmering expanse that isn’t water but behaves like it, surface rippling with colors she doesn’t have names for. There is no sky, or maybe the river is the sky, stretching out in all directions.
Across from her, always, is Jonas.
He stands on a shore that isn’t quite a shore, because there is no land here, only points of light like stars hung low enough to touch. He looks different in every dream—older, younger, wearing clothes she doesn’t recognize—but his eyes are the same.
“Hey,” he says, like they’ve just bumped into each other at the corner store. His voice carries without echo, straight into her chest.
“Hey,” she says back.
The river hums beneath their feet. On its surface, scenes flicker by like reflections in a warped mirror: a woman closing a book, a child dropping an ice cream cone, a man stepping onto a train. Lives, small and huge and ordinary.
She reaches out, once, curious, and her hand passes through the surface up to the wrist. It’s not wet. It feels like falling through warm fog.
When she pulls back, her fingers glow faintly, then fade.
“What is this?” she asks.
“Don’t you remember?” he says.
She frowns. “Remember what?”
He opens his mouth, pauses, shakes his head.
“Never mind,” he says. “Want to see something cool?”
He stamps his heel gently. The river ripples. The reflections shift. For a moment, she sees herself in the water, standing at her bedroom window at age fourteen, forehead pressed to the glass. Then she sees Jonas, sitting on a rooftop she’s never been to, guitar in his lap, moonlight on his face.
“I think this is… everything,” he says quietly. “All the choices. All the days.”
“Okay,” she says. “That’s not terrifying at all.”
They laugh, even though it is.
When she wakes, back on the hotel carpet, Jonas is already awake, staring at the ceiling.
“Did you—” she starts.
“The river?” he asks.
She nods.
“Yeah,” he says. “I’ve been having that one for… a while.” He sits up, rubbing his face. “Except this time, you were there.”
She swallows.
“Same,” she says.
They look at each other, pale morning light filtering through the hotel’s glass doors.
“You said you checked you weren’t dreaming,” she says slowly. “Did you mean that one? The river?”
He nods. “I’ve had that dream for years. It always felt more real than anything else. I thought it was just… anxiety. Or some deeply pretentious metaphor my brain cooked up.”
“And now?”
“Now I think we’ve been… meeting there. For a long time. Without knowing.”
She thinks of all the nights she woke with the taste of river on her tongue and no words for it. All the mornings she wrote down fragments in a notebook—water that isn’t water, stars that aren’t stars—then crossed them out. All the times she felt a strange sense of loss for something she couldn’t name.
“You never saw me?” she asks.
He shakes his head. “I saw… someone. Sometimes. A shape. But no face. Like my brain censored it.”
“Same,” she says.
They sit in the lobby of a hotel neither of them has ever stayed in, beneath a chandelier that will never sway again unless the world starts up, and they admit that they have been dreaming of each other for years.
Softly. Like a confession.
It changes things.
Not all at once. At first, they still walk the city like anthropologists, cataloguing frozen lives. They still eat from abandoned bakery cases, drink from water fountains that pour for no one. They still sleep in different places each “night” and meet at the river, where they experiment with what the water will show them if they ask nicely.
But now, their orbit tightens.
His shoulder brushes hers more often. Her hand finds his automatically when they cross streets that no longer have moving cars. Their jokes become in-jokes. When he hums a melody under his breath, she recognizes the shape of it from the river, where she once heard it carried on the current.
They learn the secret fears behind each other’s bravado.
She learns that Jonas canceled his tour not just because of stage fright, but because he had a panic attack three minutes into his first set, years ago, and never forgave himself. He learns that Ava never moved to Berlin because her mother cried on the phone and said, “I just never thought you’d be the kind of daughter to leave.”
“Which is ridiculous,” Ava says, half-laughing, half-crying, standing in front of a frozen mailbox stuffed with unsent letters. “Of course I should be able to… go. Live.”
“You still can,” Jonas says.
She looks around at the motionless world. “Can I?”
It’s a question that hangs above them, even when they don’t look at it directly.
Because the more they wander, the more the city begins to… fade.
It’s subtle at first. Colors draining from signs. The red of the stoplights fading to rust. The greens in the park grass blurring into a softer gray.
Then whole corners blur at the edges. A block they walked through yesterday is suddenly… thinner, like a photograph left in the sun too long. The people are still there, but they’re less distinct, features smearing.
“It’s like a copy degrading,” Jonas says quietly, standing at the edge of a street that now disappears into white fog halfway down the block.
“Or like it’s being… erased,” Ava says.
They test it. They walk toward the fog. It feels like pushing through curtains made of cold breath. On the other side, the city continues, but it’s… different. Familiar streets rearranged. A coffee shop where there used to be a bookstore. A mural on a wall that was blank before.
“This wasn’t like this yesterday,” she says.
“How do you know?” he counters. “Time’s weird, remember?”
She glares at him. “Because I remember.”
He nods, conceding the point.
“Maybe this is… all our maybes,” he says. “All the ways the city could be. The dream version’s bleeding into the real one.”
“The real one stopped,” she says. “So which one is this?”
He doesn’t have an answer.
That night—or what they decide will be night—they stand at the river’s edge, the hum of the water louder than usual.
“You feel it too,” she says, watching the surface flicker.
He nods. “Like we’re… out of time. Literally.”
They stand in silence for a while, watching scenes drift by. A woman in a hospital bed, laughing with a nurse. A teenager on a stage, eyes wide in the spotlight. A man in a small kitchen, cooking eggs for someone just out of frame.
“I think we’re in the crack,” Jonas says softly.
“In what crack?”
“Between the world sleeping and the world waking up again. Like… a buffer zone. A loading screen.”
She snorts. “That’s a very unromantic way to describe a cosmic limbo.”
“I contain multitudes,” he says, dry. Then, more serious: “The question is… do we leave it?”
She looks up sharply.
“What?”
He meets her eyes across the shimmering expanse.
“I think we’re being asked,” he says. “Stay here, where it’s just you and me and all the possibilities. Or… let it go. Step back into the moment everything stopped.” He gestures at the river. “Hit ‘play.’”
“Why us?” she asks, throat tight.
“Because we’re awake,” he says simply. “Because we matched. Because we’ve already been coming here in our sleep for years. I don’t know.” He laughs once, helpless. “Because the universe has a messed up sense of humor.”
The idea lodges behind her ribs and will not dislodge.
Stay here.
Just us. Walking endless empty streets, peeking into frozen lives, sleeping under chandeliers, meeting at a river where they can dip their hands into everyone else’s moments and occasionally their own. No expectations. No mothers calling with weaponized guilt. No brothers waiting for texts. No tours to cancel, jobs to quit, flights to take.
Stay here, where the only person who can disappoint her is herself. Or Jonas.
Her stomach flips.
“And if we leave?” she asks.
He looks down at the river.
“Then everyone wakes up,” he says. “The milk jug falls. The candles get blown out. The texts get sent. The tour happens or it doesn’t. The kid still drops her ice cream. The man on the bus still…” He gestures vaguely. “Goes wherever he was going. Time catches up.”
“And us?” she presses. “What happens to us?”
He’s quiet for a long time.
“I don’t know,” he says finally. “Maybe we forget all this. Maybe we just… go back to being two strangers in a city of millions. Passing each other in the street. Sharing dreams we don’t remember.”
“You think this is a test,” she says.
“I think it’s a choice,” he says.
The river swirls between them, silent and vast.
She feels a rush of anger that is too big for her small body.
“It’s not fair,” she says. “We just found—this. You. Me. Whatever this is. And now we have to choose between keeping it and… saving the world?”
“Very messy of the universe,” Jonas agrees.
“There should be a third option,” she says. “A whatever-happens-we-get-to-keep-each-other option.”
He smiles, small and pained.
“In my experience,” he says, “that one’s always the most expensive.”
She wants to say, Then I’ll pay it. She wants to say, Let them sleep. Let the cake never be cut, the text never be sent, the tour never be finished, if it means I get to keep walking through empty streets with you.
The fact that the thought even occurs to her scares her more than anything else that has happened.
On some level, she knows it’s not really about Jonas. Not entirely.
It’s about the way the silence has wrapped around her like a blanket. The way responsibility fell away when the world stopped. The way she hasn’t had to answer anyone’s expectations but her own.
The way it would be so easy to stay here. So easy to say: I opt out.
Jonas must see something of that war on her face, because he takes a step closer, the river between them rippling but not widening.
“Ava,” he says quietly. “Look.”
He nods toward the water.
Scenes flicker past faster now, like someone has pressed fast-forward.
An old woman sitting at a kitchen table, staring at the clock. A baby taking its first unsteady step, arms outflung. A boy on a bike, pedaling furiously down a hill. A woman in an airport, clutching a boarding pass like a lifeline. A man standing outside a door, bouquet in hand, taking a deep breath before knocking.
These aren’t their lives. They aren’t people they know. But they are… everyone.
“They all get a say too,” he says. “We can’t hear it, but… they do.”
She presses her lips together to keep them from trembling.
“What do you want?” she asks him. “Really.”
He looks at her.
She can see the battle behind his eyes. Fear vs. longing. The siren call of safety vs. the messy, exhausting, beautiful cacophony of a world where people can hurt you and leave you and ask things of you you don’t want to give.
“Before this,” he says slowly, “I think I wanted everything to stop. Just for a bit. To breathe. To not have to… be anything to anyone.” He laughs, self-conscious. “Careful what you wish for, right?”
“Right,” she echoes.
He scratches the back of his neck, gaze flicking down, then up again, as if he’s afraid of what he’ll see in her face.
“Now,” he says, “I want to play that stupid tour. I want to answer my brother’s text. I want to be nervous on stage and mess up and know that the world keeps going anyway.”
He takes a breath.
“And I want to meet you. For real this time. Standing in line at the coffee shop. On the subway. Wherever. Without the river. Without the silence. I want to see what we are when we don’t have the whole world paused around us. When we have jobs and families and obligations and… exits.”
“It might not be as magical,” she says softly.
He grins, quick and crooked. “Yeah. That’s kind of the point.”
She looks down at the river. At the lives streaming by. At her own reflection, rippling between them. For a moment, she sees herself catching a flight with an overstuffed backpack, cheeks flushed. She sees Jonas on a small stage, voice cracking on the second verse and smiling through it.
She sees herself walking past him on a crowded street, eyes on her phone, not noticing.
Fear claws at her.
“What if we don’t find each other?” she asks.
“We already did,” he says simply. “Over and over. For years. In our sleep. Tonight. I don’t think the universe brings two people together in a dream river and an empty city just to… misplace them.”
“That’s not very scientific,” she mutters.
“Don’t tell the man on the astrophysics book,” he says.
She laughs, broken and real.
He reaches out, hand hovering above the water.
“We can stay,” he says. “We can walk this ghost city until it fades into static. I won’t pretend I don’t want that, a little.”
He looks at her, eyes dark and earnest.
“But every time I think about it, I see that kid in front of the birthday cake. The candles never melting. The wish never made. The breath stuck in his chest forever.” He shakes his head. “I can’t… do that to him. To all of them. Just because I’m scared.”
She thinks of her mother, hand hovering over the phone. Her brother. Her almost-life in Berlin. Her unwritten songs, stories, apologies. The text she hasn’t sent. The tour he canceled. The people on the bus. The painter with the blank-eyed portrait.
It is, in the end, a selfish choice that somehow isn’t.
She steps closer to the water until the strange not-wet licks at the soles of her feet.
“Okay,” she says, voice shaking. “Okay. We hit play.”
Relief and sorrow wash through Jonas’s face in equal measure.
He holds out his hand.
“Together?” he asks.
She stares at it.
Then she takes it.
Their fingers interlace.
They step forward.
The river rises around them, up to their ankles, their knees, their waists. It doesn’t feel like drowning. It feels like standing under a waterfall of radio stations, every life playing at once, every moment overlapping. It’s too much and not enough. It’s terrifying and familiar.
She closes her eyes.
The last thing she hears before everything dissolves is Jonas’s voice, close to her ear.
“See you soon,” he says.
Then the world—
—starts.
The café is loud.
Noise crashes over Ava like a wave—espresso machines hissing, chairs scraping, someone laughing too hard at a joke, music humming from tinny speakers. Her heart slams against her ribs. Her hands grip the edge of a small round table so hard her knuckles whiten.
“Are you okay?” a voice asks.
She looks up.
The barista is watching her, milk jug in hand, eyebrows drawn together.
“You kind of… spaced out for a second,” he says. “Do you need water? Or a chair that doesn’t appear to be trying to throw you?”
Ava blinks. The weight of two years of unslept dreams sits behind her eyes and then, slowly, dissolves like sugar in coffee.
“I’m—” She swallows. “I’m okay. Just… weird day.”
“Aren’t they all,” he says wryly.
Outside, cars move through the intersection. A bus rolls past, the driver focused ahead. A child reaches for a cookie sample and actually grabs it. Above the counter, the second hand on the clock jumps from thirteen to fourteen.
Her phone buzzes.
A text from an unsaved number appears on the screen.
you free to talk sometime this week? i miss you. — L.
Ava’s breath catches.
She looks at the message for one long, suspended heartbeat.
Then she types back:
yeah. i miss you too. how about tuesday?
Her thumb hits send before she can overthink it.
The café door opens.
A man steps in, shaking rain off his hair. He is carrying a guitar case and a tiredness that seems to go all the way to his bones. He looks around, scanning for empty seats.
For a moment, her vision doubles.
She sees him as he is now—stranger, damp, a little lost—and as he was at the river, standing on the shore with his hands in his pockets, asking if she remembered.
“Hey,” the barista calls. “We’re a little full, but you can grab that stool if you want.” He gestures to the empty seat next to Ava’s table.
The man hesitates. Their eyes meet.
There’s a flicker. Something like recognition, like when you hear the first note of a song you love but can’t place.
“Is this seat taken?” he asks.
His voice is warm, with a lilt she doesn’t have a name for, but feels like coming home.
Ava’s heart does the weird thing again.
She smiles.
“Not yet,” she says. “But it could be.”
He laughs, surprised. He sets the guitar case down carefully and sits, leaving a polite gap between them. Up close, she can see the faint ink stain on his thumb.
“I’m Jonas,” he says, offering his hand.
She takes it.
“Ava,” she says.
Outside, the city rushes on, fully awake. Somewhere, a child blows out candles. A painter adds one last stroke of blue. A man presses send on a text. A tour email gets typed, not deleted.
In a place beyond names, a river runs on, carrying reflections of everything that was, and is, and might yet be. For a brief moment, two faces appear side by side in its surface, laughing over coffee in a crowded café.
Then the water ripples, and they’re gone, folded back into the endless, waking world.
The End
Author’s Note:
This story grew out of that quietly terrifying fantasy of “what if the world stopped and it was just us?”—and how tempting it would be to stay in that safe, suspended moment. I wanted Ava and Jonas to feel the full pull of that soft apocalypse and still choose the mess of ordinary life, trusting that if they were meant to find each other in the quiet, they’d find each other in the noise too.
— Aveline
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This is stunning. Beautiful story!
I truly enjoyed your story