"A second is just a second, short and transient. But if you take that second and stretch it out into infinite divisions, you may just find that it lasts forever."
.
"It's funny, don't you think?" Mantis forces a smile and shakes his empty tankard with a spiked foreleg. "No matter how fast I run. Always seems like I end up in the same place."
The bartender grunts once, cleaning wine glasses behind the counter with a rag. He doesn't seem the least bit interested. No one is.
.
Mantis isn't lucky in friendship, nor is he in love. It's not that he's unable to sustain relationships, but rather he rushes them too much to obtain anything out of them. After all, no one could fault him for his enhanced reflexes and superior senses, but they could fault him for being obnoxious. His tempestuous impulsiveness and impudent wit did not do much to assuage this flaw. No one really wants to construct a saltatory relationship with him, leaping the different levels in one bound, forgoing all meaning it may have originally possessed. He simply has too much time and not enough people to share it with.
He does get close, sometimes. Once, while saving a colony of ants from an anteater, he manages to attract the attention of a passing female mantis, who makes herself comfortable on a nearby dandelion to watch as he dispatches the ravenous mammal. After he is done tying the anteater's limbs together with its own tongue, she gets up to inspect her potential mate more closely. Even before she can take two steps from the plant, he's in front of her, trying to force his head into her mouth.
She manages to fight him off with great difficulty and steps back, panting and thoroughly affronted. "What," she snaps, "the hell?"
Unperturbed by her annoyance with him, Mantis shrugs impatiently. "You were checking me out, weren't you? So we're in love, aren't we? Now hurry up and eat my head." He edges closer to her, prompting her to back away in alarm.
The unfortunate female is lost for words, unable to comprehend this alien creature in front of her. Eventually, she laughs derisively. "You are just desperate, aren't you?" Turning to leave, she wipes away traces of him from her mouth to finalise the rejection before leaping into the grass.
.
He finds out a long time ago that he is just too fast for the world that turns way too slowly. Other animals bore him with their polysyllabic words and sesquipedalian ravings; any conversation longer than twenty words is excruciating to be a part of. The days span nearly weeks to him, somewhat of a temporal distortion, a dilation of time that only he is cognizant of. Mantis operates and perceives with such legerity that everyone else seems to move in slow motion around him, and he smirks at their ignorance.
He is proud of it, though, for it is what makes him an excellent combatant. In battle, swords stop before him, throwing knives freeze in the air and enemies' blows turn sluggish, allowing him to counterattack easily and deftly. A gift that most warriors would kill to obtain, Mantis prizes it above all, but this quickly turns into a dreadful curse the day a steel cage drops over him in a distant swamp on the outskirts of town.
Mantis's first days in his small jail are torture enough. The futility of escaping by force becomes apparent quickly; bouncing off the bars yield no result whatsoever. Besides attempting to escape, there is little that he can do. Fatigued, he lies on the floor, and he waits. He suddenly becomes aware of the dimensions of the cage, how small his world has become. The air around him becomes denser; physical claustrophobia starts to set in slowly but surely, consuming him from the outside in.
He will learn later (much, much later) what it is like; to die by degrees, to live out countless lifetimes, to watch the innumerable hours morph into days, then into years.
.
Night slowly blends into day; seasons begin to collapse upon one another, fusing together until it becomes impossible to demarcate their transitions. There are days where he falls asleep in winter and awakes with a start to the summer heat seeping through the bars of his steel cage.
The first night of every season is always the hardest. His diminutive body never acclimatises quickly and it hits him with a shock; prolonged days and truncated nights, temperature drops and weather changes, all according to the spin of some seasonal roulette. By day the sun circles above in the convex sky, taunting him and by night the moon sends down its silvery light to grieve his imprisonment like the sorrowful wife he never took the time to find.
Nights are less dark, now that he thinks of it. Less dark but just as cold, if not colder; the creeping frost nips at his appendages and chills his soul. Mantis falls into his bed (which is anywhere) and waits for sleep, fitful and restless, to overcome his insomnia-ridden body. He spends the hours awake, counting every breath taken – measured and frail – and proffers each one to the profound blackness.
.
One day, he has a rare dream about a large boat drifting in a lagoon, and the departing flight of a bird (which could have been representative of the momentary ellipses at the end of a sentence in which a promise was made, trailing off; delaying finality).
The rain comes quickly in the monsoon season. Water trickles down the bars and pools around his prostrate body, an aquatic bullseye with him at its centre. He makes no effort to avoid getting wet, allows the water to wash over his large abdomen and cleanse his forelegs. He can see his reflection in the liquid mirror – a shocked, bewildered mask with a pair of antiquarian eyes gazing back at him, each slow blink weary and hopeless. All reminiscent of some archaic baptization. Now, he thinks dully, release my soul to the heavens and conclude this endless torment.
He will remain immobile as long as the rain continues to fall for hours, listening intently. The rain scrabbles at the metal roof of his cage, forming a rapid drum on the carbonised steel, giving the inorganic material its own detached pulse – a macabre variation of Chinese water torture. Mantis tries hard, but is unable to distinguish it from the quick, clockwork beat of his own heart.
.
Acupuncture interests him greatly, and he doesn't try to hide his fascination with the field. The utilisation of an external stimulus, a foreign object, to influence the flow of chi opens up endless possibilities in traditional medicine. A single needle, the end an atom thick, plunged into a nerve point accelerates, slows down or redirects chi flow to the acupuncturist's desire, with either a localised or general effect. Nerves fire at the speed of electricity, reaching every cell of the body. This is the idea that enthralls him; that something so small can impact an entire system with such magnitude.
.....