Conducting Time
Dr. Serena Koo discovered she could see time gaps during routine heart surgery. Not the metaphorical kind—actual rifts in spacetime, shimmering between systole and diastole, each cardiac contraction creating a microscopic pause in reality. At first, she thought it was fatigue, the result of too many thirty-hour shifts. But the gaps were always there, waiting in the space between heartbeats.
The discovery started small. During a valve replacement, she noticed how time seemed to stutter around her patient's exposed heart. The surgical team didn't see it—they never did. But Serena watched as each contraction created a tiny tear in the fabric of now, a moment when time held its breath.
She began recording her observations in a notebook she kept locked in her desk. The gaps varied by patient. Children's hearts made barely perceptible pinpricks in reality, while the elderly created longer pauses, as if their lifetime of heartbeats had worn thin spots in the universe.
Her colleague James thought she was working too hard. "Take a vacation," he said over coffee in the doctors' lounge. "When was the last time you saw your daughter?"
But Chloe was exactly why Serena couldn't stop. Her thirteen-year-old's congenital heart condition meant surgery was inevitable. And Serena had started to develop a theory about those gaps.
She found the first proof during Mrs. Harris's triple bypass. As she held the elderly woman's heart, feeling it beat against her gloved fingers, Serena saw how each gap contained fragments of other moments—glimpses of what looked like alternate possibilities. A flutter showed Mrs. Harris at her grandson's wedding, though the real ceremony was still months away. Another revealed her painting in a sun-filled studio, though Serena knew from the intake forms that her patient had never touched a brush.
The implications were staggering. Each heartbeat wasn't just pumping blood—it was puncturing tiny holes in possibility, letting glimpses of other timelines leak through.
When Chloe's surgery could no longer be postponed, Serena insisted on performing it herself. The ethics board objected, cited conflict of interest, but her record was impeccable. They relented.
In pre-op, Chloe squeezed her hand. "Will it hurt, Mom?"
"Not at all, sweetheart. You'll be asleep the whole time." Serena kissed her forehead, breathing in the familiar scent of her daughter's shampoo. "And when you wake up, your heart will be perfect."
Under the operating room lights, Serena saw the gaps more clearly than ever. They formed around Chloe's struggling heart like soap bubbles, each one containing a different future. In one, Chloe was grown, conducting an orchestra. In another, she was climbing mountains. Each gap showed her daughter living, thriving, her defective heart nothing but a childhood memory.
But there were darker visions too. Timelines where the surgery failed, where Chloe never woke up, where Serena spent the rest of her life visiting a small grave.
As she began the repair, Serena realized she could do more than just observe the gaps. If she timed her movements precisely, worked in the pauses between heartbeats, she could reach into those moments of possibility. Choose which future would become real.
The surgery took nine hours. Nine hours of peering into quantum rifts, of selecting the right moments, of stitching together not just heart muscle but reality itself. The team thought she was being methodical, thorough. They didn't see her fingers sliding between seconds, weaving timelines together like sutures.
Chloe recovered perfectly. Better than perfectly. Two months later, her follow-up echocardiogram showed a heart that had apparently never been defective.
"It's remarkable," the cardiologist said, reviewing the results. "I've never seen anything like it. It's as if the condition never existed."
Serena just smiled, remembering how it felt to reach into those gaps, to pluck the best possible future from an infinity of options and pull it into now. She never told anyone what she'd really done during that surgery. Who would believe that healing sometimes means reaching between heartbeats, into the places where time comes apart at the seams?
She still sees the gaps during surgery, still watches possibility leak through with each cardiac contraction. But she doesn't reach into them anymore. Some doors, once opened, are best left alone. Besides, she got what she needed—one perfect repair, one chosen future .
These days, she watches Chloe practice violin and remembers all the futures she didn't choose. Sometimes, in the space between notes, she swears she can still see them, shimmering like heat waves, like roads not taken, like hearts that beat in perfect time.
Dana Wall traded balance sheets for prose sheets after years of keeping Hollywood's agents and lawyers in perfect order. Armed with a Psychology degree that finally proved useful when creating complex characters and an MBA/CPA that helps her track plot points with spreadsheet precision, she ventured into the haunted halls of Goddard College's MFA program. Her work in Bending Genres Journal, Mixed Tape Review, New Verses News, Intrepidus Ink, 96th of October, 34 Orchard, Eunoia Review, Summerset Review, Witcraft, Neither Fish Nor Foul, The Shore Poetry, Bright Flash Literary Review, and Sykroniciti confirms that words are more reliable than numbers, though occasionally harder to balance.