A Moment In Time

Martin Gerber was a small man, always dressed in a white shirt, grey pants, and a rather ugly green tie with pictures of golf clubs covering it that his wife had gotten him. He did not like golf, or any sport for that matter, but it had been a birthday present, and he had little care for fashion, so he wore it exclusively in appreciation as much as apathy. Large black-framed glasses were the only thing that stood out on him, though they were not really large so much as they only seemed so on his face. His accounting job and routine schedule to and from it completed the picture of an uneventful life.

Now, small, unassuming men need not have small, unassuming minds. And an observer might believe Martin to have a fantastic intellect, or imagination despite his appearance. They might believe such a thing as they stared at Martin drinking a cup of tea on the bench in front of the bookstore where he spent his lunch hour, his line of vision fixing on nothing in particular for very long, inevitably ending up somewhat north of his dull brown shoes, and they would be completely wrong. There were no great gears turning under his thinning hair and no big ideas bursting out of his tightly-shut mouth. He had little to say on any subject outside his work, of which he was not that interested in discussing, and did not feel inferior because of this. Everything was as it should be in his eyes. One had to be economic not just in action but in thought, and if anything he said could be classed as a real opinion, it was that people wasted life on pointless thinking. In this way, he largely ignored everything superfluous to his little corner of the world.



His most effective way of accomplishing this was a decision to never consider anything outside his home and office too closely, which, on this particular Tuesday, he went against. It was a normal day in all respects; he had finished with his numbers and was on his way to the bookstore, stopping first at the cafe next to it for his tea. What made him stop and examine the bench was the sign placed on it stating that it was wet with varnish. Wet with varnish. For some reason he could not process the meaning of those words and stared at the bench uncomprehendingly, realizing after a minute that he had never actually looked at the thing he sat on every day, thinking of it as a bench. It was just something hard he sat on. Now he could not stop looking.



Not only could he not comprehend the words, but the bench was something utterly alien as well. What was it? Tentatively, he reached out and gripped the backrest, then pulled away from its cool, sticky surface, wiping his hand absently on his white shirt, leaving a crimson stain. Martin did not notice the manager of the bookstore looking at him from the door, nor the woman behind him trying to decide if she should attempt to get by him or not. He did not notice anything but the bench with his handprint on it, and could not stop wondering why it existed. Somewhere in the distance a faint rumbling began. The only thing clear in the quickly forming fog invading his mind was that he would not be getting back to work.