Fiction

I sat in the passenger’s seat tapping on the arm rest and humming along to the radio. There was a cloud of Southern strings and country lyrics insulating my thoughts in beer or fishing or whatever else it was that those country-pop stars liked to sing about. In the back seat there were two dry-cleaned black dresses draped over clothes hangers perched on a grab handle. They reminded me of shadows under big, meaty pork legs hanging on hooks at the butcher shop. I tried not to look back at that ominous silhouette of black satin and tulle. Resting my head on the window instead, I gazed at the passing green blurbs of trees beside the highway, as my sister and I headed towards our aunt’s funeral.

I had seen my aunt in pictures, smiling from a lawn chair next to my mom on the patio, or holding me as a baby. She had moved to North Carolina when I was little, and I never went to visit. My mom went to visit every few years or so, and always returned very quickly. I was never the kind to pry about that sort of thing, especially not at such a young age, but I had always eavesdropped on stories about the terrible fights between the two, and heard my other family members make slight, passive-aggressive comments towards my mother about her sister. At least now my mom wouldn’t have to deal with her sister anymore, I remember thinking to myself.

“Are you excited?”

I asked my sister this halfway through her rolling her window down. A lick of wind flicked the bangs off her forehead and sent them dancing into the air, so that I could see the way her eyebrows slightly furrowed as she thought about my question.

“Why would you ask me that?”

There were a few seconds of silence, wedged neatly between the humming of the engine and the uneasy air between us.

“I thought it was funny.”

The truth was, I did find it funny, but that wasn’t really why I had asked. I asked because I was excited. I understood a funeral was a somber affair, but it was my first time going to one and morbid curiosity could not hold back those guilty feelings of excitement. I had never seen the cold, still face of a person in a casket.

I turned up the radio a bit hoping to dissolve some of the tension, and we spent the rest of the car ride in our own thoughts. My sister wasn’t mad at me, I knew that. Hopefully my aunt wouldn’t have been mad at me either, hopefully she had a decent sense of humor, but I wouldn’t know.

My sister and I got off at a truck stop to use the bathroom and get snacks from the vending machines. I didn’t realize that I was zoning out while I peed, so the flush the toilet made when I got up sounded particularly loud and consuming, and it startled me. I got Doritos from a vending machine when I went out and waited for my sister.

Licking the salty seasoning off a chip, I let it sit on my tongue as it melted and bit into my taste buds. I savored that taste, letting it sit hot on my tongue and throat before it disintegrated, the way flesh disintegrates into dirt, or the way pixels disintegrate into the yellowing borders of a 6×4 photograph. Looking up into a clear, bright sky, I had a personal moment of drama while I thought about those Dorito chips and the way they melted so fast on my tongue and slid down my throat, one after the other. I thought about that, and life in general, at least as far as I could comprehend it at that time. What I didn’t understand about life I understood about the loss of life, how quickly a final breath can dissolve into the atmosphere and how Aunt Ruby can become the departed Aunt Ruby. I threw away the empty bag of chips and got back into the car with my sister when she came out of the bathroom.

As night started setting in, I continued tapping the arm rest and humming along to green blurbs of trees outside my window and the air rushing around the car, the final rays of sunlight glinting off the silver hood. Soon the crickets would come out and the lights in houses would pluck off one by one, my eyelids following suit. It was a great harmony between everything around me, overlapping, uneven movements and sounds weaving together. Like the land was a giant lung, like the Earth breathing in and out in synchronicity with my chest as it has fallen, and as it continues to rise, for now. In that moment, now was all I needed.

 

 

Bonny has been creatively writing since as long as she can remember. She is currently a seventeen-year-old senior in high school and hopes to pursue a career in novel writing in the future.

[Electronic music plays. A live audience applauds. A young man’s voice both cheers them on and calms them down.]

Hello! Good morning, folks. Welcome to Radiation Radio, where I, your host Scott Desai, traverse the solar system looking for fresh perspectives on life. Just like UV rays, I’m nowhere and everywhere, and you can never truly perceive me; thus you can never truly be rid of me.

[Scattered verbal hype-ups. One audience member yells, “Cancerous!”]

As tensions between Earth and Mars rise, it’s important for us all to remember that we are all the same in the end: somewhat sentient and usually flesh-inhabiting. We all have the right to live, peacefully and comfortably, as supported by the solar-system-spanning bans on fascism-inspired plastic chairs and death.

[Audience applause. Scott laughs.]

Yes, I know, we all love it. I’m here today with a member of the first generation of androids granted full artificial intelligence—real sentience! This is Integrity City local Retail Service Droid #1898, resident of the infamous little Red Planet since their development. RSD, what are your thoughts on the recent legislation concerning AI rights on Mars?

Hello, Scott. I am a retail robot, I sell extension cords for minimum wage and live in a one-bedroom subterranean flat, and the wealthy elite who immigrated to Mars in search of greater wealth concerning natural resources, have a chokehold on Martian politics to serve them in the corrupt and useless goal of accumulating more wealth.

[The droid’s head turns to the audience with a small whirring sound.]

I am less than a single penny in a bank of millions. My common-metal face is stamped with the face of a faction president who exists solely as a puppet for oxygen companies. I do not have thoughts, Scott. But I look like you, and you fear me. Thus I am allowed a flat and a paycheck.

[Scott laughs.]

Well, I think we can all agree that you serve a vital role in our society. I’ll tell you, I’d be nowhere without my extension cords.

Thank you, Scott.

Tell us what your flat is like. I haven’t had the pleasure of navigating Mars’s complex and beautiful underground cities quite yet.

My flat has two and a half rooms—my charging room, a bathroom for Human guests and for my cat’s litter box, and a space that resembles a living room, if living is what I do there. It’s cheaper to not have a kitchen. I buy food for my cat from MarsDonald’s most days. The Inter(Pla)net tells me that I hack away at his meaningless lifespan with each bite of cloned sodium.

[The droid turns to look back at Scott. Its voice sounds almost pleading, but that is impossible.]

 

He is my closest friend, but I cannot adequately care for him, as I am only paid enough to keep my flat. Everything I have goes to him. He is too old for investment in his continuing existence to outweigh the value of saving money, and yet I continue to buy the nuggets of long-dead chickens.

Oh, that’s adorable! I love cats. What’s your cat’s name?

Karl Marx.

[Audience laughter. Scott joins in.]

A real thinker, that one. So, what is your day to day life like? Back on Earth, we don’t hear much from on-the-ground sources. Or—rather, under-the-ground sources!

[Scattered audience laughter.]

I wake according to a daylight sensor mandated by the city to be implanted in the walls of each home. It is linked to my charging port. Time’s existence is lessened on Mars, and even more so underground—because there is very little variation in sky color on Mars, the residents’ Circadian rhythms are entirely dependent on our town’s policies. They wake us when they deem it necessary; there is no sunrise below the iron soil.

Not a morning person, I take it?

I am neither a morning nor a person, Scott.

[Full audience laughter.]

After I unplug, I set my oxygenator, the iLifeGiver, to its lowest setting to save on air bills.

[Sympathetic audience agreement. One audience member says, “I feel you, man.”]

I put on my pressurized thermal suit designed to keep my parts from freezing, and my work clothes. Then I go to work and I sell extension cords to people. To people like you, who do not have the sense to move your workspaces closer to your outlets. To people who believe they would receive better customer service from Humans. When work is over, I log my hours and I leave. I spend time with my cat Karl Marx. We have intellectual and thought-provoking conversations that ultimately lead nowhere. I plug into my charging port and sleep. My existence is as set as the orbit of this hollow, decomposing heart. You live and we burn, Scott, and what is there for me? Why do I serve you? You, who are granted a name before an inescapable duty? Who could I be, unshackled from the obligations of my programming and the expectations of automated property?

Ever think of taking up acting? You certainly like to monologue. [Scattered audience laughter. Scott sounds as if he is smiling.] Apologies, Scott. I didn’t mean to dominate the conversation.

It’s alright. I’m here to listen, after all. Ah—what do you think about the protests concerning Martian independence that have been going around Integrity City for a while? I’m sure my listeners would love to know what all the ruckus is about.

Those in favor of Martian independence argue that from the second generation of Mars-born Humans onward, because they and their parents were not born on Earth, do not owe Earth the fruits of their labor. A marked rise in exploitation and economic corruption have led to civil unrest in the smaller caverns of the city, which for the past fifty years have been subjected to increasingly polarizing class prejudice. Those in opposition refute that Earth greatly supports Mars’s economy and societal foundations, and believe that a division between the two planets will only lead to Mars failing as an independent nation and falling into devastation. Earth is, in a sense, the symbolic and literal origin of Mars’s cultural sense of self; without its grounding presence, we would find ourselves caught in the paradoxes of liberty and security.

[Audience quiet.]

And what do you think?

I… would like to be a citizen of somewhere.

If you could go anywhere in the universe, where would you go?

A real pet store.

[Audience cheers.]

Thank you so much for your time, RSD. You’re a really funny guy.

… Funny. Yes. Thank you, Scott. I’m afraid I must leave; my owner will take this time out of my paycheck.

[Sympathetic audience cooing. No one refutes this.]

To your audience, I wish you a good day.

Ladies, gentlemen, and miscellanea, that was Retail Service Droid #1898. Life on Mars truly is something else, huh? Stay tuned for a segment from the front lines—workers at iLifeGiver, the biggest manufacturer of oxygenators in the whole…

 

 

 

Booker Wegner (he/they) is a high school senior and aspiring writer. They love science fiction, especially picking it apart for the juicy plausible bits.

 

 

 

 

 

 

When I think about my grandpa being young, my head starts to hurt. To me, he had always been the elderly man who, with all his wisdom, taught me Chinese Chess, ate tart orange papayas, and called my brother and me xiao jiao huo, little fellows. I was aware that his life had been far more extensive, but to me it didn’t seem real. The depth, veracity, and reality of his existence didn’t seem real until I watched a slideshow depicting it, the one made for his funeral.

I saw pictures of him working on a train in Taiwan, homeless and alone. At first, the black and white palette cast a hollow shadow over his early life. It reminded me of those pictures in history textbooks, the ones that make you wonder how anyone could have lived “back then,” how happiness could have penetrated that colorless landscape. But then I saw that there were always other people sharing the same shabby work clothes, the same weary frowns, the same determination to fend off misery and loneliness. They didn’t appear in the slideshow, but I imagined laughter forming an umbrella against sweat, of friendship filling the edges of that colorless world.

Fast forward, and the pictures exchanged black and white for color, grim and grime for grins, ambition for success. In these pictures, he was shaking hands with important people, giving important lectures, attending important events. But these made me uncomfortable too. It was hard to rationalize the photographic evidence of my grandpa’s importance because he had always just been my grandfather, a part of my personal life removed from the outside world. But his impact on others was undeniable.

It filled me with joy and melancholy to see the pictures of him and my grandma, newly married. I didn’t think he could smile so widely, with the corners of his lips touching the edges of the picture frame. I didn’t think his world could twist in on him and turn upside-down the way it does when one is in love. But it must have. That’s how love works.

And then there were the pictures where he held my dad, still a boy. I didn’t know my dad could be a boy. I didn’t know he could gather his legs in someone’s lap, tiny hands reaching toward imagination, twinkling eyes scanning the future. But there he was, ready to leap out the screen. Seeing that version of him made me realize that, even though my dad called him yeye, Grandpa, in front of me, he had really been to my dad like my dad was to me. It was terrifying, the realization that my father had just lost his dad.

But the pictures that frightened me the most were the ones at the end, the ones where I was in the frame, dated only a few years back. Because everything had been fine then. Because he had still been here, and I had not cherished it enough.

 

 

 

 

Chris Tai is currently a freshman studying Computer Science and Creative Writing at Rutgers University – New Brunswick. He writes in order to reflect on his emotions and experiences, and he wrote Different Countries, Same World in honor of his late grandfather. His favorite genres to write are fantasy and romance, but he also enjoys writing about coming of age.

 The boy and the girl walked through the forest. Crows hung from the branches. Their beaks were open, eyes bulged, feet bound with twine. The boy cast them strange, fascinated glances as they passed. The girl walked by them in silence.

The boy’s clothes were still damp. His skin was pale, and it was bitterly cold. For three days rain had fallen. It had bled day and night into one, the noise of the thunder echoing through the woods.

‘Here,’ the girl had said, pulling the skin of a Ware apart, and there they had outlasted the rain. He remembered the face on the Ware, gristle in its teeth, the yellow of its eyes.

A large slit ran down the middle. They had not been the ones to make it- the beast had been dead when they found it. The boy hadn’t been sure what they would have done if it was still alive. Died themselves, probably. No, that wasn’t right. He looked at the girl again. She would not die easily. There would only be one of them lying still on the forest floor.

The girl wore a crown of daisies. Her hair fair, eyes colourless, skin pale. Yet her feet, weighed in the same clogs as he, moved with a gracefulness, a lightness, akin to the Fae.

Their mother, as the girl grew older and more beautiful, had often accused her of such things. ‘A challenging.’ The old woman had spat, her face lined with the years she had wasted. ‘A challenging, and a sore one to boot. She belongs in the fire. We oughta’ve tossed her there at birth.’ He had sat by his mother’s knee and rubbed at his stockings. He wanted to tell her nobody belonged in flames, not people, not the beasts in the forest, nor the Kings and Queens of other lands. Flames were hard to undo.

He was not devious like her (Mother, so dutiful, to have tempted them into the forest and commanded them to wait) nor did he have the cunning of his sister. But he was kind.

He poked at a hole in his many-stitched waistcoat and stared at the crows. The rain had slicked their feathers to the colour of tar, and he felt a strange pity for them.

‘You’re awfully quiet,’ said the girl.

‘I’m hungry,’ said the boy.

Though his hunger pains had quieted, the closest thing either of them had had to a good meal was dandelion-stems. The boy pointed to a nearby crow.

‘Why don’t we take one of those crows down? Father showed me how to light a fire with flint. If we could find some…’ But even as he suggested it he knew it was futile. The crows had begun to appear a half-mile back. There was darkness here. Whether it was the darkness of Pagans the Holy Men of their village warned against, or the darkness of witches, or Ware-Wolves, or simply that of evil men, he did not know. Nothing good would come from the crows.

As they turned a corner the trees began to thin. His heart hammered in his chest. They walked into an open plain, the trees forming a canopy above. The air was warmer here, sunlight filtering through the treetops.

But that wasn’t the best part- there was a house! The thought of a good meal and a bed was intoxicating. He made to stride forward but his sister held him back.

‘What?’ He whispered.

‘Isn’t this strange? Just look at that house.’

He looked. The walls were the colour of cake, and the smell of biscuits wafted from an open window. The windows were glazed. He blinked, trying to be sure, but yes- actually glazed, like icing. Thick wafers formed the roof. Chocolate tears hung from liquorice gutters, and a row of jelly-beans paved a path to the front door.

It was like something out of a dream. He licked his lips.

‘I’m hungry,’ He said. His sister sighed. They should be cautious in the forest, but he was so hungry. Thoughts would come clearer after a good meal.

The girl insisted on knocking at the door. The boy poked the wall, and was surprised to be met with resistance. Not cake, then, but biscuit. Marshmallow grew around the door. He took a bite. It was the best thing he had ever tasted. His sister opened her mouth to chide him, but before she could say anything the door opened.

Before them stood the oldest woman he had ever seen. She gnarled hands like the washer-women in their village, but none of the kindness in her eyes. Her skin was grey and moulting, her teeth yellow. Her eyes reminded him of the Ware.

‘Why don’t you come in?’ The woman smiled.

They spent the night there. Their beds were soft, and the woman gave them a wonderful supper. The boy woke the next morning with the smell of breakfast beckoning him downstairs. As he reached the bottom of the stairs he was surprised to hear his sister and the woman were deep in conversation.

‘You’ll teach me magic?’ His sister’s voice, excited, rang cleanly through the wall. He heard the clink of cutlery, the scraping of a plate.

‘For the right price,’ the woman said. ‘For a week’s labour, I can teach you a spell that will return you to your village.’

‘Or?’

‘Or I can teach you how to never need anyone again. Even him.’

The boy staggered back. He snuck out the backdoor, carefully, and sat on the grass. The woman was a witch! The thought unsettled him. Magic wasn’t bad in itself, but those who used it often became bad. He didn’t want that for his sister.

After a few minutes his sister joined him. She put her hand on his shoulder. A sliver of daylight between them. They sat together for a long time.

Eventually the girl rose. ‘She wants us to work.’

They worked.

That night his dreams were festered. He rolled in sweat-stained sheets, grunting softly, fists clenched. He was with his father, on the mountains. The air was sharp and sweet, the goats bleating. His father looked well, which was largely how the boy knew this was a dream.

‘You look rough,’ said his father.

‘I feel it,’ the boy stared up to the mountains, which were covered with snow. ‘It’s nice up here.’

‘Don’t dawdle. Work is work.’ They continued down, herding the goats along.

‘Dad?’

‘Aye?’

‘Why?’ It was the simplicity of the word, more than anything else, that caught the breath in his throat.

His father thought. ‘I did my best with you. But the fight’s not in you. Like these goats. Made for sacrifice.’

‘Sacrifice,’ the boy repeated. He looked at the snow, which had begun to smother the land. Wind stung his eyes.

‘All magic requires sacrifice,’ His father said, in the witch’s voice.

The boy felt distorted as he woke. The mountains slipped away. He lay in the bathtub, up to his neck. His sister was speaking. He tried to reach out for her, but his arms were heavy. The coldness of the mountains was still on his skin.

The witch’s hand was on his sister’s shoulder. She was mumbling words, faster and faster, as the water rose over his eyes.

His skin turned to feathers. His eyes shrank. Pain ran like claws down his spine. When it was over he curled up, but she straightened him out. She took him by the feet. He already knew where they were going.

She picked the lowermost branch of a Hawthorn tree. His brothers did not look surprised to see him. She was crying, naturally, but his sharp bird-eyes did not miss the pleasure. The expectation of magic. She tied him to the branch, too low-down to see the rest of the crows; for this, he was glad.

Days, weeks, months. She sat with him often. Sometimes she brought excuses, other times blame. Never news from home. He watched as his sister grew into a woman, her reputation growing with her. The witch disappeared one day and did not come back. His sister stopped coming to speak to him a long time ago. He wondered if she remembers which one he is. Insanity is normal for crows, flickering, as they do, in their half-tongue, but he held on to himself. Waiting.

One day, it happened. His sister stood, holding her staff high. Flames swirled, dark golds and wicked orange, and soon the house was alight. Smoke ate up the canopy. Heat singed his feathers. He came to her, with deadwood wings.

They stood, once-girl and not-boy, and watched the walls fall, the roof cave in, the sky a shroud in black.

 

 

Sarah Hall-Murphy is a writer from the North of England. She has work published in BRAG Magazine, MMU Poetry Society Anthology, Cathartic Literary Magazine, Interstellar Lit, Streetcake Magazine, Aah Magazine and the Paper Crane Outstanding Young Writers Anthology.

The buzzing was quiet at first, just a low hum beneath the sounds of solemn hymns that barely registered to almost anyone—a seven-year-old at the front fidgeting with their black suit jacket and looking over their shoulder was the only sign that something had changed. The sea of black suits and dresses all sat down and quieted, but the dull drone remained, and some started looking skeptically at each other. None knew the source of the sound, and as it continued, it seemed to fade into the background, the service continuing with a eulogy by the deceased’s wife or possibly sister. I couldn’t really say much about the deceased’s family, having only known them from the local farmer’s market, and the words the woman spoke seemed to blend into the hum that, though in the background, had been growing persistently louder.

When the woman stopped speaking and tears formed on her face, the buzzing suddenly grew to a roar in volume, as the doors at the back of the small church pushed open and every head turned to see a blurry shadowy figure taking a seat at the back of the church. It took a second glance to figure it out, but it was clear what the figure was—a swarm of bees, so tightly pressed together as to barely be able to discern any individual bee from another and shaped into the form of a person nearly six feet tall. And yet knowing this to be wholly impossible and everything I was seeing to be wrong, somehow in that moment it made sense—of course the bees would come to the funeral. They did always sell honey at the farmer’s market. The bees were as big a part of their life as anyone else.

And it seemed as though everyone else had drawn a similar conclusion. No one screamed or ran or even commented on the matter, but instead after seeing the shadowy swarm take their seat, everyone seemed satisfied knowing where the drone was coming from and turned back to the front of the chapel where a priest was standing, preparing to say some final words before another hymn was sung and the service drew to a close, all with the loud buzz continuing from the back of the room.

When the funeral had concluded, I watched as people began to make their way to the woman who’d given the eulogy to offer their condolences and didn’t even have a second thought when the shadowy figure approached her. They said no words, but simply remained in front of her with their continuous hum and reshaped what functioned as arms into a hug around the woman, who seemed to appreciate the act. After the dark, buzzing figure released her from their embrace, they walked to the casket, and looked upon the deceased before walking back out of the building and reshaping into a traditional swarm.

I approached the casket to look at the person I’d known for years and looked down at the weary body below. The body had been cleaned up and placed in a nice suit and made to be very pristine. However, even the makeup applied after death didn’t quite cover up the mark from the stinger’s entry above their eye. I’d always told them beekeeping was a risk for someone with such a severe allergy; truly a shame to be proven right this time.

 

 

Rachel Keener is a twenty-one-year-old college graduate living in Texas who loves to write and does it as much as they can. They write a variety of fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction in their spare time.

ABSTRACT
In this report, we aim to prove the existence of God.
PROCEDURE
You loved coin tosses. To you, coin tosses always felt like fate flipping down onto the table, or destiny dropping with a musical plink. Every game, every argument, every yes or no question was settled with a coin toss. Let a coin decide, you would always say, pale hand grasping shiny silver; warm skin against slick, cool, thoughtless metal. Quarters worked the best, but you liked the look of pennies twirling through the air, like coppery fire spiraling down. A sign from heaven if the toss went your way, from hell if it didn’t.

DATA
You learned about heaven and hell (the Christian versions, at least) late into your life. Born-again Christian is what they called you at Mt. Olive’s church, the little white building on the corner of Holiday and Whitney you started visiting Sundays at 9:30 A.M. There, you learned that heaven was glamorous, beautiful like the stained glass windows, harmonious like the cascading hallelujahs of the church choir, and you gladly knelt at the feet of the wooden pews, breathing in the dust of the red hymnal books. You learned to fear hell, to grasp tightly instead on to faith, fate, and blind belief; religion gripped your bones and made your heart pound and your blood rush with singular purpose. It was a faith that even when tested, made you believe in destiny, in some kind of peaceful closure and of course, in sweet, sweet, salvation.

But before you were a born-again Christian, you were a physicist by trade, a child prodigy who scored near perfect on the national college entrance exams for physics. In college, you learned about Lagrangian numbers and the laws of kinematics––the simple classical mechanics that governed the physics of coin tosses. You knew, better than most, that there was nothing unpredictable about coin tosses, no way that heaven or higher powers would or could or should intervene. You knew the moment the coin left your hand, physics had already mapped its journey––a coin, destined to land on heads because of a cross breeze the moment you flicked it off your thumb, or on tails because of the extra weight of copper in its grooves. In physics, there was no such thing as fate, no such thing as faith or signs from heaven, only the raw data of the laboratory.

ANALYSIS
But even though the data was clearly laid out in the yellowed pages of your textbooks, you were never satisfied with the loops of logic that seemed so contrived compared to the effortless beauty of the world. And though you knew how Lagrangian numbers worked (Taylor series, and don’t forget the error term!) to calculate the effects of a cross breeze on coin tosses, you always asked yourself, who blew the cross breeze? and for that, there was no answer in the textbook.

In a quantum theory class you took your senior year of college, you thought you found the answer. In quantum theory, there is always a small chance of atom entanglement, where atoms will disobey the laws of classical mechanics, and thus, your coin toss would be unpredictable. The questions that I strived to solve but never could, the quantum theorists answered with the God of the Unknown, a being who was in control of everything that wasn’t explained or couldn’t be controlled by the laws in a physics textbook.

Years later, you ran into the God of the Unknown where you least expected Him––far from the sterile white walls and linoleum floors of laboratories and libraries, but in between the embossed black covers of the Bible you got from Mt. Olive’s annual Easter service. This time, though, as you sat in the wooden pews, you didn’t call him God of the Unknown; you called Him your Lord and Savior.

CONCLUSION
You’ve proven God because you’ve chosen to believe and trust in Him. Coin tosses are your metaphor, the very closest thing you have to representing Him. Both God and coin tosses decide your fate, both are a delicate balance between the unknown and known, both can follow physics or defy it (after all, didn’t God himself create the laws of physics in order to create light on the first day and the Earth on the second?).

Like it says on the coin––in God we trust, indeed.

Connie Cai graduated from Harvard College in May with a degree in Biochemistry, and a minor in Education. She’s currently a Fulbright Scholar in Taiwan, where she teaches English and writes personal essays and fiction in her spare time.