New flash fiction: Chronos by Andrea Porter

When Eternity meets social media... what if Time is so bored that it amuses itself photobombing other people's selfies?

Today's contributor is Andrea Porter, a Cambridge (UK) based poet who says she has just begun dipping her toes into the short story/flash fiction waters.

​Her recent books include... House of the Deaf Man, a collaboration with the contemporary artist Tom de Freston about Goya's 'black paintings,' published in 2012 by Gatehouse Press This book ...is a remarkable thing. Andrea Porter's poems and Tom de Freston's images capture the spirit of Goya's Black Paintings without aping them: in other words, they are entirely their own thing, yet inspire in the reader/viewer the same sense of disquiet and dread and awe -because there is a beauty too. It's as if they have both breathed in his darkness and made it their own. ...Sir Anthony Sher (Actor, Director, Writer and Artist)    

Her collection A Season of Small Insanities was published by Salt Publishing the fascinating cut glass surfaces of her work, always tug against an undercurrent of darkness and violence ...Jo Shapcott


​Chronos
by Andrea Porter


One moment is… this, the next… that. Seems obvious but it takes my skill to use that fact. People waste time, they throw it away on just the necessary or mundane... breathing, rubbing at a scratch card, making a cup of tea, watching an upload on YouTube of a chimp wash a cat in a sink. 

This latest mindfulness crap was what made me start to behave badly. Slow the clock in the library, the café, the market place, hold the instant in suspension and watch it all slow to the pace of a glacier. Use this fucking pause, I thought, to have a better day, beat pain or stress, feel connected to the universe.

I liked to think of myself as creating transient art installations, people trapped in a moment like flies in amber. I walked around them, examined their faces and wondered if behind those eyes there was a glimmer of recognition that they were between heart beats. I never stole their wallets, credit cards, watches, rings, that would be tacky. Nor did I humiliate those I didn’t like the look of; you know pull their trousers down, place a traffic cone on their heads. I treated each scene like a photograph, photoshopped it to make it more interesting; sometimes slightly surreal with a touch of the absurd.

However I have indulged myself and used their mobile phones to take a selfie with me beaming over their shoulder. I like to imagine their confusion when they see the image posted on their Facebook or Twitter feed and wonder just when they did that. I have become the stuff of urban legend the ubiquitous face in the photograph. 

It was an addiction I admit but it hurt no one and intrigued many, I liked that, making people speculate. I could have limited myself to the famous but it was the ordinariness of people that I really enjoyed; christenings, birthday parties, funerals, weddings, graduations all those markers they put in place to celebrate the passing of time. 

In the past getting into a portrait was impossible as both the painter and the painted were stilled. I would have liked to have appeared in The Last Supper. I did manage to appear in a number of early films, there was Eisenstein’s October, the camera ticking on whilst everyone just gawped in that frozen way they have as they remade history.

Of course film editors were much less scrupulous than they are today now I can be wiped from existence with one click of the mouse, what a great metaphor for how humanity is now with their weapons of mass destruction, drones and carpet bombing. Sometimes I hanker for the simplicity of the arrow, the spear and the sword... so small scale, so humane. 

Keeping time locked up can take its toll. Last night a car skidded on the ice, I held it just before it hit a woman pushing a buggy across the road. I could see fear in the driver’s eyes, the realization in the mother’s face that there was nothing she could do. The little girl in the buggy was fast asleep locked away from consequence.

There are rules as I said. No amount of mindfulness could stop what was about to happen or make those involved feel better about it after the event. It hurts me though, living in the moment can be a myriad of little deaths. For once I disobeyed and dragged her and the child a metre to the left and watched as the car just missed them. 

I sit at home now and wait, I can sense something unraveling or is it being wound in. Time will not allow me to forget meddling in even the smallest event, it has consequences. Those Fates were always bitches. I feel the ends of my fingers beginning to tingle, phase out of sync with this reality. When I am swallowed whole this reality will go with me. Was that woman and child worth a whole universe? Maybe, maybe not, but then I am bored of this reality; the next one will probably not contain selfies, cars, men and hopefully not fucking mindfulness.