🌈 The Fractal Story Engine | Time & Reality | (7) TR-002-D1
The Minute did not arrive this year in the usual way.
Instead of the single frozen hush, there was a shimmer in the light, followed by a crack, thin as a hairline fracture in glass.
He stepped out of the school building as the bell echoed and faded, then stopped completely. But when he reached the corner, he saw himself.
Another version of him, older perhaps, or simply more tired, walked the same path with his hands deep in his coat pockets, head tilted toward a sky that no longer moved.
He turned. Behind him, another self was kneeling in the snow, touching a stone he had passed a hundred times without notice.
To the east, near the church steps, a third self pushed the heavy door open and slipped inside.
Each self moved unaware of the others. No acknowledgment. No ripple. They existed in parallel, like pages torn from the same book and flung into the wind.
He stood at the crossing, where streets forked into lives.
The air was wrong here. It shimmered at the edges, as if the world were struggling to hold its shape. Each time he took a step, the pavement beneath him flickered between brick and gravel, then back again. Lamp posts blinked uncertainly between iron and bone. And still the Minutes passed, or did not.
He followed the one who entered the church.
Inside, incense clung to stillness. Candles, forever unlit, lined the aisle. His other self sat in the pew with hands folded, not in prayer, but in waiting. Watching the altar. Breathing.
When he reached the front, the figure stood and exited, passing him without glance. He took the place, sat down, and found the air thick with memory not his own.
Voices swam in the silence: a girl laughing in a garden, the sharp click of coins on stone, a door slammed too hard to be accidental.
He stood and left.
On the street, the city now bloomed with mirrors. Every window reflected not the outside, but scenes from another Minute: a market burning, a mountain dissolving into sky, a child alone in a room full of clocks.
He ran toward the one kneeling by the stone.
The other self turned as he approached, their faces nearly the same. The kneeling self held the stone as if it mattered, as if it were heavy with meaning. He opened his mouth to speak, but his voice stayed inside.
The sky began to stutter.
Clouds froze, rewound, then split into ribbons. Birds reassembled from ash and flew backward through an hour he had never lived. Light folded itself into impossible angles, and with each shift, he felt his choices tighten.
The first version of him, the one with hands in pockets, now stood at the fountain, watching nothing. The wind moved through his coat but left his hair untouched.
He looked at his selves.
The church. The stone. The fountain. The boy in the street, the man in the mirror, the shadow on the stairs. All of them him, none of them known.
He understood.
The Minute had split not because of time, but because of choice. Each action held a weight he never carried. Each version had stepped into a path he avoided. Now, all waited for him to decide who would continue.
He closed his eyes.
When he opened them, the Minute collapsed into one.
Snow fell. The bell finished ringing.
He was standing beside the stone, alone.
But he remembered the church. He remembered the fountain. He remembered the weight of each self that might have been.
And as he walked forward into the unfinished day, his footprints glowed briefly before vanishing behind him.