J. Brown

I called emergency services from the beach near the old stone ruins. My wife had walked to the waterline to collect shells. The shoreline jumped — the water vanished in an instant, replaced by a dry concrete crater stretching out for miles. She was standing in the middle of it, completely still. Not moving. Like a frozen hologram. The dispatcher's line went dead. A voice kept repeating on the handset: report any missing seconds. I'd lost eighty-nine seconds. The sky turned the color of an empty screen.