The Cost of Correction

She can rewind time.

Not in the dramatic way people imagine. There’s no bright flash, no sound like a tape screeching backward. It feels more like holding your breath and stepping sideways. The world softens, loosens, and then slides back to where it was a moment ago.

At first, she only rewound a few seconds. A dropped mug before it shattered. A word she wished she hadn’t said. She’d feel a pressure change behind her eyes, like stepping into a different room, the pressure in her chest, and then everything would be righted. Clean. Corrected.

She learned quickly that time remembered even when people didn’t. The mug didn’t crack, but her hand still shook. The words were unsaid, but the weight of them stayed in her mouth.

She practiced in private. She’d walk to the edge of a crosswalk and let a car roar past too close, just to see how far she could go back. Five seconds. Ten. Thirty, once, on a day when she felt unusually strong and unusually lonely. Rewinding longer made her stomach lurch, like time was trying to throw her out, as if the universe resented being dragged by the collar.

There were rules, though she never agreed to them. She couldn’t rewind past her own consciousness. Sleep was a wall. If she passed out, that was it. And she could only rewind herself. The rest of the world followed along, unaware, like extras reset between takes.

She tried to test that too. Once, she rewound after burning her hand on the stove. The skin went unmarked, but the pain lingered, ghost-bright and insistent. Another time, she rewound after tripping on the stairs. Her ankle didn’t swell, but she limped for hours anyway. The body, it seemed, was less forgiving than the clock.

The first big use came with her brother.

He was late, which was normal. He always drove too fast, which was normal too. The call came while she was folding laundry. A stranger’s voice. Careful. Professional. Words like “accident” and “intersection.”

She didn’t drop the phone. She didn’t scream. She rewound.

The laundry jumped back into a neat pile. The phone rang again, untouched. This time, she didn’t answer. She ran.

She rewound every few steps, forcing herself farther back than she ever had, and the pull fought her now — not with pain exactly, but with resistance, like moving through water that kept thickening. Minutes stretched into something rubbery and wrong. The pressure behind her eyes swelled and slid downward, settling into her jaw, her throat, as if time were trying to anchor itself there. Her vision narrowed to a hard, shaking tunnel. She kept going anyway, following memory and instinct and panic, dragging the moment with her until the intersection snapped back into place around her.

She stood on the corner, heart slamming, watching traffic flow as if nothing had ever gone wrong. Then she saw him. Her brother, leaning into his car, checking something on his phone. A truck barreling toward the red light.

She screamed his name.

He looked up. Confused. Annoyed. The truck screeched. Metal screamed. Glass exploded.

She rewound.

Again.

And again.

Each time she tried something different. A shout earlier. Running into the road. Grabbing his arm. Each rewind felt less like lifting weight and more like prying fingers loose. Her nose bled. Her hands went numb. Once, she rewound so hard the sky flickered, just for a second, like a skipped frame.

On the sixth try, she shoved him hard enough that he dropped his phone. He swore at her. The truck blew through the light and missed them both by inches.

Her brother laughed, shaky and loud, and called her a maniac. He hugged her anyway, quick and awkward, like he didn’t quite know why. She collapsed onto the sidewalk and threw up.

She saved him. She knew that.

But she also knew something else.

Time didn’t like being rewritten.

After that, the small things stopped working cleanly. Rewinding a dropped glass left a crack in the counter that hadn’t been there before. Fixing a bad conversation made the silence afterward sharper, more brittle. A rewind to avoid a wrong turn left her with a headache that lasted all day, pulsing like a bruise behind her eyes.

People started to feel wrong around her. They’d lose their train of thought mid-sentence. Forget why they’d walked into a room. Get headaches for no reason. Once, a coworker stared at her for a long moment and asked, half-joking, “Do you ever feel like we’ve done this before?”

She laughed too loudly and changed the subject.

She wondered if they were brushing against the seams she kept stitching and unstitching. If she was leaving fingerprints on reality, smudges no one could quite see but everyone could sense.

She tried to stop.

It lasted three weeks.

That was how long it took for the bus to jump the curb.

She was waiting with a stranger, a woman with a canvas bag and tired eyes. They stood in the weak shade of the shelter, trading the polite, empty silence of people who know they’ll never meet again. The bus came too fast. There was shouting. The woman froze.

Rewind.

She grabbed the woman’s arm and pulled her back. The bus smashed into the shelter instead. Glass everywhere. Sirens in the distance. Someone was crying. Someone else was laughing in that thin, hysterical way people do when they’re almost broken.

The woman clutched her and whispered thank you like a prayer. Her hands shook. Her eyes shone with something too big to be relief.

“You’re an angel,” she said.

That word followed her home like a bad smell.

That night, rewinding took more out of her than it ever had. She slept for twelve hours and woke up older. Not in her face, exactly, but in her bones. As if some part of her was aging at a different rate, paying a bill the rest of the world didn’t know existed. Her joints ached. Her reflection looked slightly misaligned, like she wasn’t standing quite where the mirror expected her to be.

She started keeping track. A notebook. Dates. What she changed. How it felt afterward. Headaches rated on a scale of one to ten. Nosebleeds. The creeping exhaustion that no amount of coffee touched.

Patterns emerged. Big changes echoed. Small ones accumulated. The more she rewound, the less solid things felt. Like living in a house where someone kept moving the furniture an inch to the left. Doors she swore used to open inward now swung out. Songs on the radio ended half a beat too early. Once, she found a photo of herself smiling at a party she didn’t remember attending, her arm around a woman she was sure she’d never met.

She wondered how many times she’d already rewound without remembering. How many versions of her life had been discarded like rough drafts. How many people had loved or hated her in timelines that no longer existed.

Sometimes, late at night, she felt the pull without meaning to. A subtle tug, like time clearing its throat, waiting for her to intervene. She started sleeping with the notebook under her pillow, as if that might anchor her.

One evening, she stood in her kitchen with the notebook open and the window cracked. She could hear laughter from the street. A couple walking past. A dog barking. Normal life, moving forward without permission or apology.

She dropped a plate on purpose. It shattered, the sound sharp enough to make her flinch, and immediately the pull stirred — familiar, quieter now, a pressure blooming behind her eyes and sliding forward, like time leaning in to see what she’d do. Her chest tightened. Her hands shook. She waited for it to take over, to tip her sideways and backward, but she stayed where she was. The pull lingered, insistent but uncertain, like a hand hovering at her elbow that never quite closed. She ignored it. She swept up the pieces slowly, cut her finger, let the blood bead and run warm over her skin. The ache grounded her. The pressure behind her eyes loosened, not snapping away but easing, retreating, as if whatever had been holding on realized — reluctantly — that it had no leverage here. She wrapped her finger, sat down on the kitchen floor, and breathed until the urge thinned and finally settled into silence.

Tomorrow, something worse might happen. Something she could fix. Something she might be meant to fix.

Or maybe time wasn’t asking her to be its editor. Maybe it was asking her to be a witness. To let moments land where they fell, sharp edges and all.

She closed the notebook and left it on the table, unfinished. She didn’t throw it away. She wasn’t ready for that. But she didn’t open it either.

Outside, the laughter faded down the block. A car passed. Somewhere, a door closed. The world kept going.

For the first time in a long while, the future stayed where it was. The pressure behind her eyes loosened, like a hand finally letting go.