She grasps the stone as she trains in her apartment, punching forward as hard as she can. As long as she holds the stone, Time cannot age her.
Her body is twenty-two. Strong, young, but not too young - not like she was days ago, barely able to climb into bed.
She spends the day training, and the next day, and every day for the next month - backflipping off walls, running back and forth, mountains of pushups. She has to be ready. One moment - that’s all it will take for Time to get her. One moment.
As she trains, she reflects on how long she’s been here. Forty long years. Forty horrible, cruel years.
One night she stops, exhausted. In bed, clutching the stone, she sleeps. She dreams, and she remembers. She remembers the first day she lived in this home. She was twenty-three. She remembers trying to leave, and ending up on the ground older than one could imagine, utterly infirm. She lay there for hours until she got the hint and crawled away from the door, reverting back to her twenties as she went. Forty years of this. Waking up as a helpless infant. Waking up as a ninety year-old. Everywhere in between, for forty years.
She does not know why Time does this to her. She has a hunch that it’s toying with her. She hates it more than she can comprehend.
Her dreams are filled with memories of sobbing her eyes out in sheer despair, screaming for her mother a year into her internment. Always trying to grab the knife faster and faster, faster than Time can move so she can cut her own throat open before it gets her. She’s never fast enough.
She wakes up. Today’s the day. She grasps the stone and rushes the door, smashing it open with a leaping kick. Before both of her feet hit the ground, she’s off down the hallway - the first time she’s seen it in forty years. Her heart is pounding in exhilaration - she’s made it! She’s smiling as she nears the turn to the stairwell.
Except…
She feels it. She clutches the stone but she feels it. Her skin wrinkling. Her muscles weakening so fast. She screams in rage and despair. She reaches the turn for the stairwell, but slams into the ground as she does, her body now in the mid-hundreds. She can’t move. Soon she’s sobbing hard. It was all a game. A game. It had control the whole time. Soon, there’s just darkness.
She wakes up in her bed. The door is closed, and she is now thirty-one. She glances at the butcher knife on the nightstand. With a single purpose, she grabs at it, fast. She’s not fast enough. Her arm, now old, twisted and wrinkled, flops weakly and helplessly onto the nightstand. Filling up, she sobs bitterly, and as she does, she can sense - somehow - from somewhere beyond eternity, cruel and proud laughter.
