Time does not forgive those who try to outrun it.

The Third Button

The watch did not tick.

Elizabeth noticed that first, though it would take her years—years she would later unspool and examine frame by frame—to understand why the absence of that small, ordinary sound unsettled her so deeply. In a world built on movement, on progress measured in seconds and heartbeats, a thing that refused to mark time felt like a quiet defiance. Or a warning.

She found the watch in a pawnshop that should not have existed.

The street itself was familiar enough, a stretch of tired storefronts she had passed a hundred times without looking. But that morning, the pawnshop sat wedged between a boarded bakery and a nail salon whose windows still displayed sun-bleached posters advertising colors no one asked for anymore. Elizabeth was certain—absolutely certain—that the shop had not been there the day before.

The door was open.

Inside, the air smelled of dust and old paper, the kind of smell that suggested history stored improperly. Objects crowded the shelves, but none of them seemed willing to be noticed. Her attention went immediately to the glass bowl at the back of the room.

The watch lay alone inside it.

Its face was smooth and unmarked, dark as a shut eye. Three buttons lined its side, dulled not by age but by use—worn as if pressed often, urgently, by nervous thumbs. When Elizabeth lifted it, the weight surprised her. It dragged slightly at her wrist when she slipped it on, as though resisting the motion.

“How much does it cost?” she asked.

The shopkeeper did not answer right away.

He was thin, colorless, his smile too slow. His eyes flicked—not to her face, but to her wrist, lingering there with a look that felt uncomfortably like recognition.

“More than it used to,” he said at last.

Then, quieter: “You’re late.”

Elizabeth laughed, unsettled, and paid him anyway.

She would later try to remember the sound of the register, the scrape of coins, any proof that the transaction had been real. She never could. When she looked back on that morning, the memory behaved strangely—compressing, stretching, resisting her attempts to pin it down. The pawnshop felt less like a place she had entered and more like a place she had been allowed to leave.

That night, unable to sleep, Elizabeth pressed the left button.

The sound vanished.

Not faded. Cut—like a thought severed mid-sentence. The ceiling fan froze above her bed, blades arrested in mid-turn. The digital clock on her nightstand stopped at 2:17. Outside the window, headlights hung suspended on the street below, unmoving points of white and red.

Elizabeth held her breath.

Nothing broke. Nothing screamed.

She stood slowly, the quiet pressing against her ears. Each step echoed too loudly in a world no longer padded by time. She walked through the apartment, touching objects just to reassure herself they were real. The refrigerator light stayed dark when she opened it. Dust hung motionless in the air, each particle a tiny monument to stillness.

Elizabeth felt powerful.

She also felt profoundly alone.

When she pressed the button again, the world lurched back into motion, irritated, as if time resented being interrupted. The ceiling fan resumed its uneven rotation. A car horn blared outside. Somewhere, a dog began barking, as if nothing extraordinary had occurred.

Elizabeth did not sleep.

Over the following days, she tested the watch carefully, methodically, the way one approaches something dangerous and holy. She learned the rules without ever being told.

The left button paused time completely. The right button rewound it—never gently, always with resistance, as if time resented being dragged backward. The center button forced time forward in violent, unpredictable surges that left her nauseous and hollow.

Rewinding made her nose bleed. Too far, and her memories slipped out of order, moments overlapping like poorly spliced film. She would recall conversations she had not yet had, feel grief for events that had not yet occurred. Fast-forward made her joints ache, her reflection subtly wrong, as if something essential were being skipped over inside her.

Pause felt safest.

Pause was a lie.

The first person she told was Betty.

Betty had been Elizabeth’s best friend for as long as either of them could remember. They had grown up on the same street, learned each other’s habits the way people learn a second language. Betty understood Elizabeth’s silences. Elizabeth understood Betty’s restlessness.

Betty painted obsessively, always layering new images over old ones, insisting nothing was ever erased—only buried. Her apartment smelled perpetually of oil paint and turpentine, its walls crowded with canvases in various states of becoming.

Elizabeth paused time in the middle of one of Betty’s sentences.

Her friend froze with her mouth half open, one hand lifted mid-gesture. Elizabeth circled her slowly, heart hammering, struck by how fragile Betty looked when time was no longer holding her together.

When time resumed, Betty inhaled sharply.

“You did something,” she said.

Elizabeth nodded, her throat tight.

“Do it again.”

They laughed then, a brittle, disbelieving sound. They tested the buttons together. Betty asked questions Elizabeth could not answer. Where did time go when it stopped? Did it remember being moved? Could it get angry?

Elizabeth did not know.

She began using the watch more.

At first, she told herself it was practical. Small corrections. Missed turns. Broken glasses. Burned dinners rewound into meals that never failed. Then bigger ones. Near-misses erased. Arguments replayed until the right words appeared. Consequences blurred at the edges.

Elizabeth started noticing stories in the news. Survivors of accidents that should have been fatal. Crimes interrupted by sudden, inexplicable delays. People describing moments of vertigo, of missing time.

No one ever suspected her.

Betty did.

Elizabeth grew thinner, quieter. She stopped talking about the future. Her apartment filled with clocks she never wound.

“You’re not fixing anything,” Betty said one night, her voice low and steady. “You’re hiding from the parts you don’t want to live with.”

Elizabeth pretended not to hear.

The night Betty collapsed, time did not hesitate.

They were in Elizabeth’s kitchen, the air heavy with the smell of rain drifting through the open window. Betty had just started laughing—about something small, something forgettable—when she stopped. Her hand flew to her chest. Her knees buckled.

Her body hit the floor with a sound Elizabeth would later rewind thousands of times.

Blood spread slowly across the tile, patient and inevitable.

Elizabeth pressed the right button.

Five minutes back. Ten.

The watch burned against her wrist, growing hotter with each attempt. Elizabeth rewound further. Hours. Days. Her joints screamed. Her thoughts tangled. She woke on the floor again and again, dragging herself backward through the same moments until memory lost its shape.

She saw herself enter the pawnshop more than once.

The shopkeeper looked at her the same way every time.

Elizabeth finally reached the instant before Betty’s pain began and pressed pause.

Silence swallowed the house whole.

Betty stood frozen by the counter, eyes bright, alive and unreachable.

Elizabeth stayed.

Days passed. Or years. Time had no shape here. Elizabeth aged in a world that refused to acknowledge it. Her reflection warped in the darkened windows. She spoke to Betty, apologized, bargained, pleaded.

Sometimes, she thought Betty’s eyes moved.

The watch grew heavier.

Elizabeth finally understood the truth she had been avoiding since the pawnshop.

Time was not her prisoner.

She was its exile.

To move forward was to lose Betty.

To rewind was to erase herself.

To pause was to rot.

Only the third button remained.

Elizabeth pressed it.

Time roared forward without her.

Years tore through the house. Walls collapsed. Paint peeled. Cities rose and fell. Elizabeth felt herself thinning—not dying, but being spent, scattered across centuries.

The watch shattered.

Time surged on.

Long after, people say the clocks in that place stop for no reason. Somewhere, in a pawnshop that does not appear on maps, a glass bowl waits.

Inside it rests a watch that does not tick.