THE CLOCK
“Time doth flit; oh shit.” –Dorothy Parker
We all have moments when time holds us hostage or scares the shit out of us. In this month's issue, our writers take on the relentless march of the clock on body, mind and soul. Don't just sit there, start reading!
Summer Ennui
Word Count 929
The summer plan was in place. My father would drive a hundred miles from our log cabin in the Eastern Townships into Montreal each morning for work, marooning my mother, my little sister, and me with no car, no phone, no electricity, on eighty acres of wild mountain top.
This was 1970; the lovely lake a mere three miles away still hadn’t received funds to clean up the mounds of toxic sludge created by a century of industrial, farming, and human waste. So swimming was off the table even if we could muster the energy to walk the sun-beaten hilly miles of a dirt road while battling biting deer flies.
My mother was forty-two, I was ten, and my kid sister was barely two years old. We were hardly a coherent group that could find common ground over long lingering boozy lunches.
Pen Pal
Word Count 923
I have a prison pen pal. I’ll call her K. She's a murderer, she murdered two people. It was a love triangle sort of thing. She’s been incarcerated 27 years, serving two, twenty-to-life sentences, in a maximum-security prison for women. Because a judge at the time of her sentencing mandated K’s time be served consecutively instead of concurrently, unless a governor —or even interim governor— pardons her or grants clemency, she’s looking at a minimum of twelve more years. K and I have been pen pals since the pandemic started. We haven’t known each other long but we each write a real letter once a week. I draw on my letters and now she copies me. I’m not much of an artist. I like fooling around with colored pencils to calm my anxiety. K is into music. She draws musical notes. Her main complaint about our correspondence is how long it takes for our letters to cross the country as she is incarcerated in New York and I live on the west coast. It takes five days for our letters to arrive. That's entirely too much time for her and she is a woman who keeps track of time.
Reappearance
Word Count 890
James was out of touch for over a year after he died on the operating table. Learning this reason for his sudden disappearance makes me pay more attention to all the sirens I hear every day, in the distance then closer.
Back from the dead, he informs me that a rogue blood infection has left him almost blind and without erections. He is pretty sure this is no way for a man to live. All he knew was that, in the middle of working on his brilliant screenplay, the whole right side of his body had seized with paralysis and the nerves of his spine experienced the kind of pain that some writers would call excruciating. Then he was in an ambulance, then prone and immobile on a hospital bed on wheels, then in the OR, spine cut apart, infrastructure rebuilt, nerves tranquilized, genitals catheterized, for days, weeks, months.
My Clock Is Ticking
Word Count 429
“My clock is ticking!” Marisa Tomei stomped her very high-heeled foot on the porch. Years ago, when I had a working uterus, I transcribed that scene from “My Cousin Vinny” on the back of a paper napkin, repeatedly reversing my VHS until I captured it correctly. Afterward, I would practice it in front of my mirror until I got her sass just right.
Today I am not pumping a pair of heels but rather lying in my hospital bed post-hysterectomy and all I can hear is the loud tick of the second hand of the large wall clock beside my bed. It seems to deliberately taunt me second by second, louder on the upswing, quieter as it winds down to the 6 at the bottom.
Are You New Here?
Word Count 436
I am sitting on the patio at Ginger Cove when the abyss opens up in front of me. Ginger Cove is the retirement community where Roz lives. Roz is the woman formerly known as my mother. Around the time she moved in here, soon after my father died, she stopped signing her emails as “Mom.” Now she is simply “Roz.” New chapter? Perhaps
Roz is upstairs taking a well-deserved nap after her three-hour bridge tournament. I head over to the community room, where there’s a gleaming cappuccino machine that dispenses high-end beverages all day long free of charge.
Time Isn’t Holding Us
Word Count 555
My mother was always late. I vividly remember being the last kid picked up from birthday parties and waiting anxiously at airports for her yellow station wagon to appear around the corner. Running late with her was no less stressful. Speeding through traffic in a futile effort to make up for her late start, my father would be fuming behind the wheel, and my mother would be doing some last-minute task like mending the hem on her dress. Those minutes seemed like hours.
Begin Again
Word Count 1092
As I approach my seventieth birthday, I grow more enamored of beginnings: No clock should constrict the imagination’s reach.
As a child, I associated time and its measurement with constraint in the deadening silence enforced by the nuns in elementary school. When we put our heads down on our desks for prayer and reflection, the ticking of the school clock punctuated our collective boredom: How long could we endure this excruciating stillness? Time was nothing but a burden, and clocks were its punishing implements.
Our Time
Word Count 888
I face his feet, my sweaty torso slumped over his legs. We lie like this for some time, quiet, our breaths slowing. I look up and notice his toenails. Too long, ogre-like. In need of a trim. I offer. “Sure,” he says, skootching to the edge of the bed. I kneel in front of him. The light is soft from the bedside lamp; the room is warm from our lovemaking. Small wedges of hard nail fall to the floor, my free hand holding his octogenarian foot gently in place. The skin is soft and there are no callouses, and I think this part of him seems young, almost innocent. A deep sense of purpose and privilege overwhelms me. I’m overcome with intimacy and I choke up.
The Superannuated Man
Word Count 2912
If peradventure, Reader, it has been thy lot to waste the golden years of thy life–thy shining youth–in the irksome confinement of an office; to have thy prison days prolonged through middle age down to decrepitude and silver hairs, without hope of release or respite; to have lived to forget that there are such things as holidays, or to remember them but as the prerogatives of childhood; then, and then only, will you be able to appreciate my deliverance.
I’m Waiting
“I’m waiting for you to arrive to bury Gingi--we’ll bury him together.” The voice on the other end of the line was choked with emotion. “I was able to get you on an earlier flight home.”
I played with the phone cord in my hand as I sat in a hotel room in Chiang Mai on a lumpy red bedspread. The steamy heat made my shirt stick to my back. What would it have taken to tell my father that I hated that dog? I definitely didn’t want to leave Thailand early to go home to bury him.
A year earlier I had left a home ruptured by divorce. I was a senior in high school when my parents separated. So bitter was the split that it forced me to choose sides. Desperate to please my father, I chose to live with him. For the most part, he left me to my own devices that year, and I took advantage—hosting parties when he was out of town, staying out late, often skipping school. I told myself I was happy being unsupervised. But by the time most of my classmates were heading off to college, I felt unmoored, as if the ground beneath me had turned to quicksand.
Twinges of Mortality
Word Count 232
I’m just walking through a room full of things I’ve collected, or made, or found, or been given, all things I love to look at, and here it comes--that twinge, a freshly minted but by now familiar reminder that I’m mortal. And not just any old garden-variety mortal-- at eighty I’m more mortal than ever. Next I endure an unpleasant moment during which it feels like I’m dead already and in mourning, and then life resumes. Twinges by definition don’t stick around, although they recur with unnerving frequency. An hour later I am staring at what is taking shape in my handful of clay, and again with the twinge. I get it, okay? Mortal. You can stop now. Except there is no you.