"Time Won’t Wait" by Andrew Shaughnessy — Our December 2021 Bronze Medal Winner

Andrew is our third place winner from the contest posted in our December 2021 issue!

What the judges had to say:

“Skillfully, this author drew us into a dream-like state that allowed us to hover between disbelief and complete abandonment of disbelief: a unique and complex story that was well done! ”

“An interesting idea for the story. A lot of background is effectively compressed into a very short space.”

“I enjoyed these uniquely portrayed characters developed in inventive ways through their dialogue and quirks. Well done. ”

Meet Andrew

Andrew (Andy) is an intellectual property litigation lawyer from Toronto, Ontario who, in his spare time, pursues his love of setting short stories to prompts in contest settings.

Time Won’t Wait

the unedited story by Andrew Shaughnessy

“Let’s discuss the dream, Nathan.” Jenn Oglethorpe lifted the cuff of her shirtsleeve and checked her timepiece—timepiece, her word. Nathan Gillespie once called it a ‘watch,’ but she corrected him, noting that the piece was an heirloom gifted by the wealthy parents of a young woman whom she had counselled back from the dead, literally, after having been called to the hospital the night of a suicide attempt. (She thought of giving it back when the woman later drowned.)

“Why do you call it a dream?” Nathan was angry that he had been brought to her, again, for observation.

“When your mother booked you in, she said you continue to be haunted by it?”

“I thought I was the patient. Why are you listening to my mother?”

“Is that what this is all about?”

* * *

On the night of his seventeenth birthday, Nathan Gillespie made an announcement. He had received an invitation to audition at the esteemed school of music in the city. While Nathan could not have asked for a better present, he would never use it. His mother, Grace, berated his father. “You should never have bought him that goddamned saxophone, Graham.” She scolded Nathan. “We give all this money to Brown for what—for you to play weddings and funerals?”

With dinner ruined, again, Stillman Wood beckoned. A seventy-seven-acre forest by the sea, at the edge of town, it was the preferred location for Nathan to “walk it off,” as Graham Gillespie would say. The land, gifted to the town by the Stillmans after the death of a loved one, served as a refuge for Nathan to escape the family home.

Nathan had been doing a lot of walking lately. Highschool was unhappily discordant. Unlike his father, or his older brother Geoff, Nathan was not going to letter in a sport. His predisposition toward maths and sciences robbed him of his energies for more creative pursuits. His parents, staunch adherents (“benefactors,” Grace would insist) of the local St. Olivet’s parish, refused to see the high school production of ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ when Nathan announced that the lead was to be played by his talented best friend—the class lesbian.

As Nathan walked, the harshness of his mother’s penultimate barb (“You are going to Brown!”) exacerbated his anger. He stood at the edge of one of the many tide pools pocketed along the shoreline and looked longingly down the coast toward the city, past the red lights of the towering smokestacks of the Donnington Power Station—the warning beacons lighting up intermittently like the countdown timer on a bomb that was, like his life, never going to go off. “You could learn a thing or two from your brother,” had been his mother’s parting shot. He kicked at the dirt.

“Mr. and Mrs. Graham and Grace Gillespie,” he sneered in an accent made up long ago to mock his mother, “respectfully request the presence of your company at the memorial service.” He angrily kicked a stone into the blackness of the pool. “Saxophone solo performed by Christ-child, Geoff Gillespie.”

As he watched the ripples of the water shimmering in the moonlight, a hand emerged from the blackness of the pool, grabbing the toe of his boot. His heart raced. The grip on his foot was firm. The body of a woman—naked, lying on her side with her face down—floated to the surface of the water.

“Are you okay?” (In later years, he would recount how his mother would criticize him for being cliché: “you claim to find a naked nymph drowning in the ocean and the best you can come up with is: ‘are you okay’?”) The woman rolled over, the soft flesh of her supple breasts softly illuminated by the moonglow. Removing her left hand from his boot, she held it up, extended her long slender fingers and flicked her thumbnail on the ring on her fourth finger: “With this ring,” she called out, “I thee wed.” She blew Nathan a kiss and motioned for him to follow.

He noticed the woman’s legs—or lack thereof—conjoined into what looked like a fishtail. “What are you?”

The woman was annoyed. “You’ve had your chance,” she taunted. “Time won’t wait.” She rolled over, flipped her tail, and disappeared under the surface of the water.

Nathan never saw her again, despite his many excursions and an unsuccessful and tragic snorkeling adventure that ended in a hospital visit, hypothermia and a misdiagnosis of (attempted) suicide.

* * *

“Nathan?” Jenn Oglethorpe tapped her notepad with the back of her pen—writing instrument, as she would call it. “What do you see when you think of her?”

“Different things. Right now, I see the wedding ring.”

“How do you know it was a wedding ring?”

“She told me.”

“We can’t properly interpret the dream if you continue to insist on its reality.”

“You can’t suppress this memory.”

“False memory, Nathan. Brought on by a lack of oxygen.”

“Wait, I met her before I drowned.”

“That’s the funny thing about the mind. Once the switch goes off, there’s no going back.”

“Well, good thing this isn’t conversion therapy then.”

“Is that what this is all about?”

* * *

There was a memorial. There was a saxophone solo, too—a lone horn moaning mournfully from the balcony of the Stillman Hotel, high above the distinguished guests sitting in the tidy rows of white lawn chairs dutifully laid out between the main resort building and the beach and is unrelenting tide. Geoff Gillespie’s enlarged photograph was displayed on an easel set up on a small stage beside his mother and his father, both in black, and the local priest. Geoff had swum out from Stillman Wood with tragic consequences.

Offshore, a lone maiden, bobbing in the mist, twisted her ring.

Jenn Oglethorpe, trying to be moved by the musical performance of her former patient-turned-actuary, looked at her timepiece, shaking it to see if it had stopped.

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