'A Brief History of Atomic Time' by Fiona McKay

In the staffroom, Kate plugs in a fan which swings from side to side, moving the stale air around. Beside her, a physics textbook is open, and she reads – An atomic second is defined as 9,192,631,770 oscillations of a caesium-133 atom. There is an orange on her desk and she peels it, inhales the bright, sweet scent. She reads about the transition between two hyperfine levels of the ground state of this atom. She is in transition between breaktime supervision and her final year French students. This atom must be at rest, at zero degrees Kelvin. Her foot taps as she refreshes her email; refreshes again.

There are sixty seconds in one earth minute. Sixty of those in an hour. Twenty four hours in a full spin of the globe. One hundred and sixty eight (she imagines this in the voice of a darts commentator) hours in the space between one weekend and the next. Between an interview, and a possibility. The orange drips juice and her fingers are sticky on her phone as she calculates the number of seconds in a week. The app refuses to multiply the 604,800 seconds by the oscillations she’d read in the textbook. She agrees. Whatever it is, it’s too many to contemplate.

She feels every single oscillation. Balances the needs of her students, and her desire for a promotion. Other factors: what her ex will have to say about it; are her children happy; does she need to worry about her pension or will the world have ended? She goes back and forth.

The effect of waiting on the passage of time should be studied. Maybe it has been, she doesn’t know. Maybe it becomes quantum time. An oscillation of a caesium-133 atom, under observation, approaches infinity. She checks her email again.

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Fiona McKay is the author of the novellas-in-flash, The Lives of the Dead and The Top Road, and the collection Drawn and Quartered. Her flash fiction is in The Forge, Gone Lawn, Ghost Parachute, trampset, Peatsmoke, Fractured Lit and others. She lives in Dublin.