Kori's frozen minute came at 2:14 PM on the third Tuesday of November. It had come at this time every year since she was twenty-four, which meant she had had twenty-eight of them. In the early years she had not known the exact time until it arrived. Now she planned around it.
She had been at the sink when it came. She put down the glass, dried her hands, and went to the stairs. She preferred the stairs now. The landing window faced the back of the building. In November the garden below was grey-brown and still, the hedge dormant, the birdbath empty. She sat on the fourth step from the top.
The woman on the landing below was frozen mid-stride, one shoe in her hand. She lived in 3B. Kori had seen her in the lift twice. She did not know her name.
In the first years, Kori had run outside. She had stood in the middle of the street looking at the stopped cars, the frozen birds above the rooftops, the woman at the bus stop with a coin pinched between two fingers. She had felt the particular silence, the weight of a world held in mid-breath. She had told her partner about it, and he had been cautious and interested and had not fully believed her, which was reasonable.
He had died eight years ago. For several years after that, Kori had spent the minute sitting next to whatever version of him the minute had frozen: at the kitchen table, in the armchair, reading. She had not chosen to do this. She had found herself there. One year he had not been in the flat during the minute, and she had stood in the kitchen with the loss of that twice over.
She did not do that anymore. She sat on the stairs.
The woman in 3B was holding her shoe at an odd angle, as if she had picked it up in a hurry. Her face had the expression of someone thinking about something else entirely.
When the minute ended, the woman walked through the landing and down the stairs, and her footsteps were the first sound Kori heard. Kori went back to the kitchen. She did not finish the glass.