Dakota

By Trudy Widjaja

She’s been here countless times. But she has never entered her grandfather’s study. The heavy mahogany door was open for once; she couldn’t resist the impulse to see what was inside.

A dark room, cold and dreary; there wasn’t anything inside as far as she could tell. But wait.

A white marble pedestal appeared. It shone so bright; Dakota couldn’t believe she missed it at first.

She approached the pedestal, and in it, stood an hourglass.

It was black, made out of what felt like stone. There was red sand trickling inside from the top chamber to the bottom.

She turned back towards the door; she could see the cat purring near the window, her grandmother in the kitchen. She turned back to the hourglass, peering at it slowly.

She reached out to grab it. Earth shook slightly.

Dakota tipped the Hourglass.

A loud crack filled the air. The lights in the study had turned on. Dakota could finally see the Victorian styled furnishing in the study. She felt a gust of wind coming from above, then from below. The wind blew and came from the left, then again from the right. A deafening rip filled the air. Earth had woken up. The room and the air turned hot. Earth had started heating up, thawing the frozen past.

Dakota looked around. The bird tweeted, the shelves opened and shut, the piano keys plunked. The cat ran backwards, the maid came and un-served tea to the leaving guest. The car drove away. The world started to reverse.

Slowly to Dakota’s shock, a loud thwacking noise came from the roof; the house was un-building itself. Within seconds the lumber, bricks, and cement, unglued themselves from one another and settled to a pile on the ground or in a bucket, the truck took them away. Dakota found herself standing outside. The patch of green where the house used to be started growing back.

The sun came down, the sun came up, the sun came back down, and the sun came back up. The cycle repeated much faster than before, to the point where light was just a blur.

Dakota gasp, the electricity poles vanished and the sky thickened, the ground moistened beneath her and the clouds above rumbled in hunger, soaking up all of the water drops from the ground absorbing it all up, filling the clouds with rain. With a loud screech, Dakota jumped out of the cobblestone street away from the car, reversing rapidly towards her. The children on the street placed skewers in their mouths, magically producing and attaching wieners and bratwursts back up on the sticks.

A loud boom appeared out of nowhere and a bomb was summoned back from the streets to an incoming airplane. More of that happened. Two men came up and started arguing. The man’s fist took contact with the other man’s shoulder and it came apart. Another man joined in with a gun.

This was all too much for Dakota to see. In the midst of her confusion, Dakota dropped the hourglass. It dropped to the ground and it rested in a horizontal position.

In that moment, everything froze, everything from sound to the air in the sky. Dakota just froze time.

She looked down at the hourglass. She looked around at the frozen picture around her.

Her heart pounded furiously, the only moving matter in the universe. She couldn’t breathe well. She couldn’t breathe in the frozen air. Slowly, Dakota forced her way through thick and frozen nothingness to pick up the fallen hourglass. Focusing very carefully, she used the slightest pressure to tip the hourglass the other way.

In that instant, everything unfroze, and Dakota stumbled to the ground.

The two men continued fighting. The man with the gun left. The airplane came back and the bomb fell. Many more airplanes did the same. Shutting her eyes from the fiery inferno, she opened her eyes to see the cobblestone street. She looked up to see the children eating wieners and bratwursts, and the loud screeching car zooming rapidly away from her. The thunders rolled and the heavens opened up, flooding the ground with water. The sky cleared and the electricity poles appeared out of nowhere.

The sun came up, the sun came down, the sun came up, and the sun came down. Light started to slow down.

The patch of grass began to brown up; the truck came, disposing the lumber, bricks, and cement. The house rebuilt itself, finishing with a thwack on the roof.

The car arrived and the guest came. The maid served tea. The cat ran. The piano keys plunked. The shelves shut and opened. The bird tweeted.

Dakota sighed.

Suddenly.

Dakota saw herself, walking towards the door. That Dakota went out and shut the door. This Dakota looked around her grandpa’s study, stunned into silence. The study began to dim back to the darkness that it once was before. Dakota quickly stood up and looked around looking for the door in the pitch-black darkness. As she fumbled around looking for the exit, she heard a ringing sound that seemed to be getting louder and louder. The ringing grew, deafening Dakota’s ears. She shut them and tried to block out the sound.

In a blink, the ringing noise stopped. Dakota was a seated. On a chair. In a movie theatre of some sort.

The screen in front glowed, and the projector whirred in silence.

An image of her locker at school.  

Graduation.

Opening a door with a key.

Cardboard boxes.

A new desk.

Some paperwork.

A check.

A rose.

A wedding cake.

A baby.

A dad.

The chair

The fireplace

His wedding.

His kids.

The bed.

The needle.

The heart monitor.

Dakota watched in silence. The screen went blank. A haunting voice spoke:

"You made Earth thaw the past.

You altered what should not have been altered.

You tried to go back to the present,

But the present had moved on without you.

What you’ve just watched was what you could have been or become.

It’s too late now.

Time to move.

On."