Wasted Time
Fiction by Anastasiia Shafran
This story arose from the inspiration session of Spill Your Dreams, Vol 4.
In this volume, we embodied the personas of Optimizer and Saboteur: those who seek to improve the status quo or dismantle it. Self-improvement, self-sabotage, or both.
Jean’s days are full.
Printed out and stuck to a wall behind her desk is an A4-sized summary of her life.
Work: 8 hours, no way around it.
Commute: 2 hours.
Chores and cooking: 2 hours at least.
Kids: 3 hours.
Husband: 1 hour, and is that really enough?
Socialising: 1 hour, if at all.
Sleep: 8 hours, preferably.
A neat 24-hour plan. On paper.
Saturdays and Sundays, no work for The Boss, and more work for The Children—football for Kara, violin for Sara. Drop off and pick up, because Richard—her husband—works weekends. And if Jean’s lucky, no birthday parties or a neighbourhood BBQ get-together on top of it.
Oh, she loves her children very much, but parenthood can be… All-encompassing.
Jean turned thirty-eight yesterday.
“New year, new me!” She rips the A4 off the wall. The tape removes a flake of old dark-blue paint. Jean looks at the exposed white scar and it stares back. Another item for the overflowing to-do list. She tosses the paper into a metal waste bin under the desk, ready to leave her home office.
“Wait!” says a mysterious voice.
Jean looks around. She is alone. Richard is working, as usual. Kara and Sara are grabbing ice cream with the neighbor kids.
“Hello?” She steps towards the window and peeks outside. No one.
“I’m over here,” the same voice. It sounds adult, but Jean can’t determine its gender.
“Who is it?”
“Under the desk.”
Jean sees nothing but a waste bin, the single crumpled piece of paper resting inside.
“My name is Waste.” The voice is close and clear.
This must be a prank. Jean looks for a recording device, but sees nothing. “You’re the waste bin?”
“Just Waste is alright.”
Jean snatches her arm back. “What is this?”
“I felt your frustration, Jean. And my essence ached for you with sympathy.”
Jean looks around. “Kara? Sara? You can come out now. This is not funny.”
“Jean. Jean, it’s alright. I am here to help.”
She bends down and grabs the bin by its rim, but it’s stuck, glued to the floor. Jean pulls harder.
“Ow! No need for that, Jean. I was going to grant you a wish.”
Jean sits beside the waste bin. She’s at her wits’ end. Overworked and tired. Now, hallucinating? Calling the family doctor is another task for her to-do list.
The list. The never-ending column of unticked squares, lined up and laid out. The shaky stepping stones of her life.
“I wish… I wish I could pause time.” If only she could catch up with things.
“Granted.”
Yeah, right.
Jean covers her face with her palms and rubs her eyes, erasing the momentary childlike hope from her mind.
The bin sits silent. As it should.
With an exhale, Jean stands.
And freezes. There’s something new on her desk: A bright pink stopwatch, not unlike the ones from her school days. The device has an analogue screen, numbers fluttering rapidly with no discernible order. One corner is chipped. The single button on top is well-worn soft rubber.
She picks it up and swipes her thumb over its circular frame. It feels cheap and fragile.
“Mommy, Sara dropped her ice cream!”
Shoving the stopwatch into her pants pocket, Jean leaves her home office. Plan or no plan, family time on weekends is top priority.
#
After dinner, Jean sits with Richard on the sofa and watches a nature documentary.
“The desert is full of life, despite its barren appearance—” The narrator’s voice is monotone, almost meditative. Yet Jean can’t get comfortable. She shuffles on the sofa, restless.
The stopwatch is still in her pocket, a reminder of her earlier encounter with a talking waste bin. Ridiculous and impossible is what it was.
Hand in pocket, she feels the plastic, slightly warm with her body heat. She rubs the button under her thumb. Closes her eyes. Click.
Silence.
Silence? The TV image is frozen, the narrator—mute. She glances at her husband. His mouth half-open, a piece of popcorn in his fingers.
Is she having a seizure? Or…
On the stopwatch, the rapid fluttering has stopped. The pixels are in disarray. She can’t read the numbers.
She clicks the button again. The narrator continues his droning commentary.
“Jesus!” Richard looks at her. “Why did you flinch like that?”
“Sorry, I thought there was a—” She fumbles for words. “A mosquito.”
The documentary pans over a desert landscape. Jean’s mind is somewhere else.
“I think I need a bathroom break.” Jean gets up. “Don’t pause, I’ll be right back.”
In the hallway, out of sight, she presses the button again. A peek back into the living room proves that everything is frozen in time again. Jean giggles. She runs to her office, out of breath with excitement, even if it’s tinged with cautious fear.
A time bubble of her own. She can do anything she wants now.
#
In a single month, Jean has read thirty-four books. She also discovered she could use her laptop as long as it was offline, so she downloaded and watched eighteen seasons of different shows. She painted three landscapes—one a desert—which she immediately hid in the attic. No need to make her family suspicious of her newfound productivity.
“You seem calmer somehow,” Richard says to her during dinner. “You finally tried meditation, didn’t you?”
“You could say that.” Jean smiles.
“I told you it would help with your twitchiness.” He looks relieved.
#
“I need to send the report tomorrow.” Jean’s boss is pacing in his office, his agitation contagious. Jean looks outside from the fifteenth floor. The view is magnificent, but today it fails to calm her. “I hate when clients do that. But you’ll manage, right?” He is trying to appear managerial, but is, in fact, pleading.
Her mind creates yet another list.
Gather the data.
Compile it.
Filter.
Analyse.
Write up the report.
A familiar shiver of anxiety crawls at the base of Jean’s spine.
“Can I delegate some of the workload?”
“Jean, it’s almost Christmas! Everyone is swamped.” He shrugs. “Just do what you can. It doesn’t have to be perfect.”
It’s her boss’s favourite phrase. And she used to believe him. Before the layoffs started hitting closer to home.
#
By the time Jean is back from work, the sun is setting.
“I ordered takeout for dinner, so you don’t have to cook,” Richard says.
Jean smiles and thanks him, then walks to her home office and locks the door.
The stopwatch is on the desk in front of her, numbers running. She downloads the datasets, cracks her knuckles, and clicks the worn-out rubber button.
Silence blooms, reassuring. She sets out to work.
#
Eight months and one hefty promotion later, she spends more time paused than not. The Christmas report was just the beginning.
Jean sips from her water bottle, weaving her way back to her cubicle between the colleagues suspended in time. No need for small talk, she smiles.
Before settling in the swivel chair again, she massages the small of her aching back, feeling a satisfying pop.
The stopwatch button clicks the office back to life.
The sight of the task list on her computer still makes Jean groan. It would be impossible to handle within the weekly allocated forty hours, even with overtime.
Hand on heart, Jean thanks the waste bin for its gift.
#
Brushing her teeth, Jean is busy running numbers in her head for today’s 10:00 A.M. meeting.
“Good morning, honey-bunny,” Richard says, entering the bathroom.
Jean mumbles a reply through the toothpaste.
“Uh oh!” He reaches to the crown of her head and plucks a hair, pointing to it. “Grey alert!” The hair’s wispy silver shines in the vanity mirror’s light, unmistakable. “Isn’t your mother sixty-two?”
“She is.” At that age, Jean’s mother does not have a single grey hair and never tires of pointing it out.
“Well, I suppose you didn’t get that gene from her, Jean.” Richard laughs and pokes her in the side, then goes to pee. Jean frowns, feeling an unexpected pang of worry. Or a warning.
So not everything is paused by the stopwatch.
#
Jean has given herself a week to taper down on the stopwatch usage, but it’s much harder than she expected.
She lays in bed, even though it is past time for her to get up and ready for work. Things that used to feel overwhelming before feel unbearable to her now.
Pulling the blanket over her head, Jean hides. From the kids who are too used to her attention. From work, that pressures her to deliver relentlessly.
More, more, more.
Richard opens the bedroom door, snatches his socks from the floor by the laundry basket, then does a double-take, noticing Jean still in bed.
She says she’s fine, waves him off, but he stands in the doorway for a moment longer, looking at her, a hint of pity in his eyes. Jean wants to throw a pillow at him.
“Is that because of the grey hairs?” he asks. “You have to let it go, Jean. We are not getting younger.”
Jean calls in sick—no way she can go to the office today. Still in her pajamas, she goes to her desk and kneels in front of the waste bin.
“Take it back,” she pleads. “Make it as it was, please.”
The waste bin gives no reply.
Jean sits back on the floor and hugs her knees to her chest. In a single week of weaning off the stopwatch, everything she has built starts unraveling, choking her with loose, unruly threads.
#
Fifteen floors up again, Jean walks to her cubicle, sheltered behind a grey privacy screen. She’s unpaused. The time is running forward, yet no one talks to her. No one mentions her birthday, two days past. Instead, her colleagues look daggers at her.
With her unmatched productivity, Jean has set an example, raising the standards. And even though she’s struggling—failing, flailing—the standards remain, forcing the rest of her colleagues to pick up the slack.
Her phone rings.
“Hi,” Richard sounds distracted, probably driving. “Doreen is bringing the kids to school and will take care of dinner tonight.”
For her birthday, Richard announced that a newly-hired nanny will help them out for the few weeks until Christmas break. To unload Jean a bit.
“Thanks,” she says and hangs up. Her resolve is gone. She clicks the stopwatch button and cries amid the frozen hostility of the office.
#
The house is eerily quiet after days of Christmas celebration. It’s midday, but so overcast that Jean has to turn the bedroom lights on. She combs through her freshly-dyed hair with the tips of her fingers, inspecting her work in the mirror. Half her head would be grey without the dull brown dye. Now, it’s an approximation of her natural brunette, only it looks flat. Fake. Like her age. How old is she now, anyway?
She tries not to think of all the time she has spent paused. Regrets and questions scratch inside her skull like nails on a chalkboard.
“Honey?” Richard knocks before entering. “Me and the kids will go to my parents for a bit, alright?” Jean looks at her reflection in the mirror. A shadowy wrinkle appears between her eyebrows. “I love you, Jean. I’m giving you space.”
She doesn’t need space. She needs time.
More time.
Jean has no will to protest. In the hallway, she hugs Kara and Sara tight. Both girls are excited to spend time with their grandparents. They don’t notice the tension hanging between their parents like sticky cobwebs.
When the front door clicks closed, Jean walks into her home office. She grabs the waste bin and hurls it across the room. It crashes into the bookshelf, rattles to the floor. Dented, silent.
Just a waste bin.
Leaning on her desk, Jean breathes hard. The fleck of white on the wall, where the paint got peeled off with the tape an age ago, glares back at her. Jean never got around to fixing it.
Bang! Her fist connects with the desk. She has all the time in the world.
Bang! Only she doesn’t. Not really.
Rage seizes her throat, pushes on her chest. She grabs the stopwatch and hurls it away at the bin. The cheap plastic case explodes into a hundred bright pink pieces.
Silence booms.
“No.” A shiver runs through Jean, like electric shock. “No!” She falls beside the broken pieces, brushing them into a useless pile.
Next thing she knows, she’s outside. On the sidewalk, a woman stands motionless, pushing a stroller. Across the street, neighborhood kids are stuck in mid-play.
Jean runs. Runs, despite the stitch developing in her side. Three blocks down, there it is.
Their car.
Richard’s face is upturned, checking the traffic light that will never change to green again. Kara’s hairbrush is tangled in Sara’s hair, their smiles bright and preserved forever.
“Undo it!” Jean shouts. “I know you can!” She pulls at the doorhandle, but the car’s locks are engaged. She bangs on the window. “Undo it, please!”
Waste has no answer.
The gift was given, the wish granted.
And what a waste it was.
More from SYD Vol. 4
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Wow. What a phenomenal story. More time equals more effort/energy spent and doesn’t truly give the solution one would think to be. Unless you actively just use it for a restful night. But, alas, that is not what many mean when they say, "I need more time in the day." This truly was beautifully depicted and the ending was heart-aching.