Time in a Bottle Lief was accustomed to being alone, but there was quite a difference between being alone in a lush green forest, and being jammed into a pickle barrel.
At first he felt sure Allie would rescue him right away. When it didn’t happen in the first few minutes, or the next, or the next, he began to get scared. Then the fear turned to anger, and then the anger itself pickled into resignation. He could hear very little in the brine, and could feel even less.
Then, as the days went by, his mind began to play the most amazing trick on him.
He was able to forget where he was. The darkness became a starless infinity that stretched into empty space. His spirit filled the emptiness from one end of infinity to the other. This, he knew, is what God must have felt like before creation. A single spirit in a formless liquid eternity. It was a feeling of such power, time itself seemed to stop in its tracks. Lief felt as if he was the entire universe, and nothing, at the same time. So glorious was this sensation of timelessness, that he was able to lock himself inside of it just as tightly as he was locked in the barrel.
Nick, on the other hand, was miserable.