Time is golden. This expression has always seemed very apt to me, especially the older I get. Time is valuable. Time is money. Gold is our standard for value, and time is our most valuable asset. It’s limited and as variable as a high risk stock, too. How long is an hour? Sixty minutes, but those sixty minutes can race by or crawl…
I’ve been fascinated by time for most of my life. I’ve told the story before of my mother explaining to me that an hour is sixty minutes. Sixty minutes seemed like a lifetime to me then. And seasons lasted eternity. I remember spending winter days inside waiting for warm weather. When could I go outside and pick strawberries from our plants and pin doll clothes on the little clothesline and catch fireflies in a jar? Wait til spring, my mother said. But how long must I wait for spring? Those winter days seemed so long to little me.
Of course now I look back and realize they probably passed in an instant, all those moments and days and months and seasons from my childhood. A blink of an eye and they are gone. Time is golden.
I named my blog “Breathe” to remind myself to stop and breathe every now and then. It’s so easy to get caught in the rush of time and care and deadlines. But every now and then we need to stop and examine what’s going on in our timeline. If we stop every now and then and breathe, we can force time to realign to our will and stop running around like Alice’s rabbit worrying about being late.
Enjoy your time because it is golden.
Tucked away in the mountains of North Carolina, the people of the strange little town of Sanctuary have enjoyed their status as a tourist attraction and Renaissance faire destination for decades. But on her twenty-sixth birthday, Kaelyn Anderson discovers a dark secret about her hometown.
The only reality she’s ever known has proven false. Now, her last hope lies in an unusual alliance with the son of the enemy she didn’t even know she had. Under the protection of Jack, an Elf prince, Kaelyn plunges into Cherokee lore to find the answer that will protect her people from invaders from another world.
Can Kaelyn and Jack form an alliance between three factions to fight their common enemy, or are they out of time?
Jack and Todd continued running for a few seconds before realizing she wasn’t with them. Todd noticed her absence first, grasped his brother’s arm and loped easily back to her side. Jack stopped but didn’t come back.
Todd took her hand, kneeling beside her. “We need to go on, Kaelyn.”
She shook her head, anguish building in her throat. “I can’t.” The words came out with difficulty. Was that a panting breath or a sob? She struggled for control. “Oh God. Please tell me that was all part of my birthday party. It’s just a game, right?” Never mind that she had just run twenty miles faster and with more ease than any marathon winner could have done. Never mind that her brother had looked away when she reminded him they had the same father. Never mind the bleeding, crumpled figure of her father on their tiled kitchen floor…
Richard. She could call Richard. He must have taken her father to the hospital by now. The police had probably swarmed Sanctuary. She could go back. Safety surely lay behind her, and not ahead of her in this unknown forest now creeping with afternoon shadows. She felt for her cell phone in the back pocket of her jeans, fingers curving over its familiar, modern form with relief.
“Kaelyn.” Todd moved in front of her now, his hands on his thighs, his voice anxious.
“Be quiet. I have to call Richard. I have to know if my father—” She broke off, her throat too tight to talk as she punched the power button on her phone.
The screen remained black. What the hell? She’d just charged it. Was it broken? She shook it impatiently.
Todd covered her hand with his and gently removed the phone. Kaelyn looked from him to Jack and back again. “I have to call Richard.”
“You can’t.” Todd brushed her hair back from her face and handed the phone to Jack. “Sweetheart, the phone won’t work anymore. Not here.”
“What do you mean, here? Is the reception bad? We should still be able to get something. There are cell towers all over these mountains. We just have to—”
“What he means is that you’re not part of that world anymore. The one with cell phones and computers and weapons of mass destruction. You aren’t part of it and you probably shouldn’t have ever been there to begin with.” Jack stuck the phone in his coat pocket. “We’re out of time.”
Michelle Garren Flye is an award-winning author of romance and women’s fiction. Reviewers have described her work as: “an engaging novel with charming and likable characters”, a story that “will make you believe in love and second chances”, and a “well-written and thought-provoking novel.”
Michelle placed third in the Hyperink Romance Writing Contest for her short story “Life After”. Her short stories have been published by the romance anthology Foreign Affairs, Opium.com, SmokelongQuarterly.com and Flashquake.com. She has served on the editorial staffs of Horror Library, Butcher Shop Quartet and Tattered Souls.
Michelle has a Bachelor’s degree in Journalism and Mass Communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a Master’s degree in Library and Information Science from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She is the mother of three and lives in North Carolina with her husband and their rapidly growing collection of pets.
