The Loop

By Peter Bowden

He woke to silence, a thin light pressing through the curtains, the sound of a clock ticking on the wall. Five minutes passed, ordinary and unremarkable. He poured water into a glass, drank, set it down. And then he blinked—and the glass was full again, his throat dry, the clock returning to the same second it had just left.

At first he thought it was memory, a trick of fatigue. He tried again—poured, drank, set it down. The cycle reset. The same morning light, the same clock hand, the same dry thirst in his throat. His heart raced as he repeated the motion, his movements already worn smooth by the rhythm of recurrence.

The world did not change, though he did. Each cycle carved deeper into him. He began to test the boundaries—shattering the glass, screaming at the walls, running for the door. But the moment the fifth minute came, he was back again, waking to the silence, staring at the unbroken glass, listening to the steady tick of the clock.

Time had become a narrow room, and he its prisoner. With each repetition, he felt himself unraveling, not with rage but with a quiet despair. The weight of forever pressed into those five minutes. It was not death he feared, nor pain. It was the knowledge that eternity had chosen something so small, so ordinary, to bury him in.


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