It was 5:30pm. It would always be 5:30pm now. Rosie’s tears became frozen raindrops.
The watch was broken and no matter how hard she tried she couldn’t get it to work. There were simply too many different pieces. It took some time to pick up all the pieces. How long exactly was hard to say. Rosie never had an actual watch, but like most she could tell the time by the light of the sun. This was now impossible, as the sun was forever stuck in the golden hour before sunset. It took her four sleeps to pick up the pieces. She took them into her house and put them on the table in the kitchen.
Over time, Rosie would grow to hate the figures of her mother and father, she missed them dearly, but could only concentrate when their bodies were draped with a sheet. Their final resting positions, father in anger and mother sobbing, were grotesque to look at and only inflamed Rosie’s guilt and anger.
The silence took getting used to. Rosie started to talk to herself.
She tried to glue the watch back, but it didn’t work, there were too many pieces and she wasn’t quite sure if she had them all, or if all the pieces of glass and metal were there or in the right positions.
Rosie ate everything in the house. It was only because she was hungry that she finally got the courage to start exploring more in the town. She went to the shops and started choosing what she wanted from the shelves. She took up reading too. There was one shop in town with stacks of old newspapers. It didn’t take her long to read them all, a dictionary by her side.
After a while, Rosie went back and cleaned up all the wrappers and packaging from the food she had eaten. She had refused to accept that she was stuck like this forever.
She soon moved out to the forest near the village. There was a nat shrine there and a small house that hadn’t been lived in for decades. In motion it would have been inhabitable, but in the still time it served her purpose. She brought all the pieces of the watch there, and began to stock the house with food. She would spend her time trying to piece the watch back with tools she had borrowed.
Nothing ever seemed to work. Rosie decided to hike to the city, perhaps there were books there that could tell her how to fix the watch. The city was fifteen miles away. She made the journey slowly, sleeping once along the way. When she got to the city, she slept nine times there before going back. She tried different foods and looked at the different people, all frozen in time. She went into the schools and the university. She went to a lecture and sat watching the professor, his arm pointed towards a large blackboard. She even copied it down. As she went back to the house in the forest, she took with her a cart she had borrowed (she mentally promised to give it back). Food and books.
Time passed for Rosie, but not for anyone else. Her hair was twice the length of her body and it trailed behind her as she walked. She had grown out of the light blue dress she was wearing at the time of the breaking, but she refused to let it go, instead, she had constantly remade it, adding patches of black cloth she had taken from a city store. The original blue was now just a shape on her chest, with the blue ends slightly more than a stripe around her midsection.
During the years of her life she discovered that she wasn’t the only one who could move through the freeze. There was a black cat who started to follow her around. There were many cats in the town, but he was the only one unaffected by the time stop. His name was Sai Ku and he kept Rosie company.
She would always return to the watch. The house was a workshop, with all manner of tools she had brought from the city. She had put it together countless times, but it never seemed to work. She would work intensely for months of her life and then give up, and go to the town and city, before being drawn back to start work again.
She knew a lot of things. She could paint, could hammer, could polish and build. The house now was a testament to this, it was a beautiful forest cottage. She read about history, about society, and started to think for herself, making patterns, joining things together, with Sai Ku acting as her tutor, asking her questions that made her think further.
She also knew a lot about the people in the town.
She learnt that the woman who ran the shop, the one that was mean to schoolchildren, had once had a son. The son had disappeared thirty years ago, no one knew what had happened to him. Rosie thought about Jan Nu’s grief and the agony of not knowing. She read the newspapers and the police reports that were stored in the city’s library. He had gone missing in the woods, and Rosie and Sai Ku searched the woods, and after a while they found the body, recognizable by the school uniform. He had fallen from a tree and the body was lost in the overgrowth. Rosie wrote a letter explaining where the body was and placed it on the counter of the shop. It would bring grief, but it would bring closure too when Jan Nu read it.
Rosie did many good things for others in that long golden hour. She wondered if it was right to know so much of the private lives of the townspeople and some of the city people too. Perhaps it would be wrong if she was like them, but she wasn’t anymore. She was a ghost now, a nat of the forest.
She thought a lot about her Mother and Father. She knew that if she fixed the watch, she could not return. She was no longer the child they knew. That girl was gone now. She considered appearing to them as she was now and trying to explain, but then thought how this would appear to them, they would be scared. They would be scared and full of grief and torment whatever happened, but being told a story about a watch that stopped time, would scare and confuse them even more. She wrote them a letter too. She apologized for taking the money and explained that she had to leave, but that she was safe and ok. She wondered if they would believe it, she knew that it was not satisfactory, that no matter what they would cry and spend years of anguish wondering about her. It was the best of a selection of bad options. But it was better than nothing.
Rosie remained committed to fixing the watch, taking time off for food and study, but returning. Her hands were larger now, but more nimble. Yet no matter how hard she tried it wouldn’t work.
There was one time when she was gazing out of the window in frustration, her eyes misted red in frustration and saw Sai Ku, the cat appear on the sill. The collar around his neck glinted in the sunlight. Which was strange because nothing glinted in this world. Yet Rosie could not remember him ever wearing a collar at all. He walked over the table towards her and she lifted the string collar, and found that it ran through a small cog.
Rosie snatched the cog and tried to hit Sai Ku, who being a cat could easily escape. She shouted at him, asking him how long he had been hiding this. But Sai Ku was confused. She had given him the collar when they met he said.
Rosie put the cog into the watch. She pressed the button and noise swarmed into the world. Rosie covered her ears at the sound of air.
Rosie’s parents found the letter. She watched them grieve from a distance. The watch was now on a chain around her neck and she used it to slip in and out of the town. She could never be fully human again and did not want to be seen. It was just her and Sai Ku now, the cat that prevented madness, but was a form of madness itself. She was a ghost, a nat of the forest.
After winter that year, to the joy of the townspeople, forest flowers sprung up all over the town.
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