(Magic Realism short story)

Every Thursday morning, old Mrs. Chen would collect time from her neighborhood. She’d shuffle down Cherry Blossom Street with her wicker basket, stopping at each house to gather the loose minutes that accumulated in windowsills like dust. Some minutes were golden and sticky like honey, while others were brittle and gray like dead leaves.

The neighbors never questioned her presence. They’d grown accustomed to her weekly rounds, just as they’d accepted that their digital clocks ran a few minutes slower on her collection days. Children would wave from their windows, fascinated by how she’d pluck temporal fragments from their garden beds with her arthritic fingers, dropping each one carefully into her basket with a soft tink.

Mrs. Chen had been doing this since her husband passed away twenty years ago. Time had started pooling around their house then, forming puddles of memories that refused to drain. Rather than drowning in them, she learned to harvest time itself.

In her tiny apartment, she kept her collection in mason jars labeled by date and emotion. “Tuesday afternoon’s daydream,” read one. “Sunday morning’s regret,” said another. The jars lined her walls like crystallized rainbows, each containing swirling moments that cast dancing shadows on her ceiling.

She never sold the time she collected – that would be wasteful. Instead, she baked it into cookies that she shared with lonely people. A bite of her chocolate chip cookies could taste like childhood summers. Her snickerdoodles held the warmth of forgotten embraces. Her shortbread carried the lightness of first loves.

One day, the neighbors noticed Mrs. Chen hadn’t made her weekly rounds. They found her apartment empty, except for the mason jars. Each one now contained a note: “For emergencies only.” The jars remained untouched, but on particularly difficult days, residents would swear they could smell fresh-baked cookies wafting through the building.

Some say Mrs. Chen simply ran out of time. Others insist she had collected enough to start her own eternity somewhere else. But everyone agrees that time moves differently on Cherry Blossom Street now – not slower or faster, just more gently, like sugar dissolving in a cup of warm tea.