#Fridayflash: Time

Your story prompt from Writer's Digest

So this is what mortality feels like, he thought, the steady trickling away of life. It seemed that his feet swung in time with the rhythm of the clock as he stared blankly into space - or where space would have been, if the meeting of the wall and the ceiling hadn’t coincided with his general line of sight.

Time rippled around him and for a moment he had the illusion of being naked, a white towel draped around his waist. He blinked and the hallucination faded. The door in front of him opened and the petite young doctor came in, frowning over her clipboard.

“I don’t understand these results,” she announced to the clipboard.

“What’s wrong with them?” His heart raced in his chest as he tried to keep his voice steady.

“None of your results fall within the normal ranges. You shouldn’t even be alive right now.”

He thought it was cute, the way she bit at the end of her pen in frustration.

“Maybe I’m not.” he said.

She rolled her eyes. “Try harder next time. Here. Bend down - let me get a look at your eyes.”

He did as she instructed, taking the opportunity to stare into her large grey ones.

“Not funny,” she snapped.

“Who’s laughing?”

“If you continue to be a creep, I’ll turn you over to the next available doctor. He’s reaching eighty, extremely cranky and will probably give you paracetamol and tell you just suck it up and live.”

He shrugged. “Maybe I should go. My time is up.” He could feel the ticking in his bones now, the many slight jumps in time, images over images appearing before his eyes.

She frowned at him. “Maybe I’m testing for the wrong thing,” she mumbled to herself.

“Yes, totally wrong. Look,” he stood. “Just remember that there’s more to life than this. It’s clichéd, I know, but it’s true. I have to go now. I’ll see you on the other side.”

He watched her from the stream of time as she looked up from her clipboard, puzzled to find that her peculiar patient had suddenly disappeared.

I’m not alive, he thought, merely immortal.

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So I dropped by Writer's Digest and the latest Your Story competition caught my eye. However, I couldn't quite just stop at an opening line, so I tried to continue the story. I got distracted by the Internet though (as usual) so it's probably not as good as it could have been.
I'll have to work on the not-getting-distracted bit.
Several posts lined up in my brain, just whether any of them will see the light of day. We'll see how this weekend works out.