100 Seconds to Midnight

Sirens sounded around her.

Ms Camille Pidranti woke with a sore head. As her eyes came to, morning sunlight broke through the low-hanging clouds and lit up the dust around her like a disco ball. Her throat was scratching with dryness, as she pushed herself off the wooden floor with a groan.

The siren sounded again.

She felt herself swaying with blurred dizziness as she stood up off the ground, and the half-collapsed building came into her view. She had been on the tenth floor, and everyone had been there with her. All of the commanders, preparing for midnight. They had been waiting for it. A ticking sounded in her head as she remembered the clock. It was on the side of it, still hanging onto the crumbling wall just as a fly near-death hangs onto a tree.

Camille made her way through the rubble and stepped over the bodies. She avoided looking at the blood. It made her queasy. As she came up out of the mountain of rubble and feeling like a rising Phoenix, she could see the sprawling devastation. Smoke was still billowing. The sunlight still trying to break its way through the mist, still trying to go back and reclaim the land. Could she go back? Could she save them next time?

She raised her hand and pressed her temple, soothing a forming headache. As she reached what would have been street level, she squinted to see through the thickness of the smoke. The mist was secondary now. Her gun battered against her leg. Out of habit, she checked she had bullets remaining. Her heart sunk as she saw; there was only one. One bullet left.

In the determined sunlight, a glimmer of light got through. It caught on something silver inside the barrel. She jumped as another siren sounded. She looked up, and a bird flew off from a fallen down tree in a hurry as if it was late to tea. She looked after it with yearning and wished she could fly along with it. She tilted her head as it made its departure cry. She sighed with deep regret as it flew off in the distance.

The ground shook underneath. A slow-burning fire had just reached its peak and exploded in a building close to her. The scent of cherrywood tickled her nose. The siren sounded. She wasn’t the only one left. As she went to close the barrel of the gun and click it back into place, the dim sunlight of the day shined on the silver again.

Curious, she looked closer and found a chain wrapped around the bullet. It was a heart-shaped locket, made of silver. The sunlight caught on its surface, shining like a dying star. She opened it and saw the face of herself staring back at her. She gasped. In the place the picture had been, barely a hundred seconds before transformed into a mirror. She was staring back at herself, but she was a skeleton, long dead. She had ordered the end of man and herself with it. A ghost!

What she thought was her heartbeat rose to be a thousand beats a minute, and it was so loud it rang in her ears. Everything blurred, and the bodies in the rubble looked as though they were standing up again, coming after her. She ran, clutching the locket, and tripped over some rocks. She whacked her head on the ground and as her eyes were closing, she looked back at the heart-shaped locket. The photo had returned. She was an eight-year-old child again, and her parents were smiling at her with joy. Everything went black.

Daffodil seeds thrived too early in the cold. Her parents were dead they said, but still, she waited in silence of the dead. She waited in red. Daffodil seeds thrived too early in the cold. They told her that she was wrong. That something about her was wrong. But she didn’t see that the little girl had gone. Her red coat made of chiffon. The flames red. Red and dead, well before they were gone. A girl in red and a girl dead. The reed had seen the yellow, making them dead in sorrow and dread. She was the one in the wrong. The other girl said she was the one who had gone. Gone with the little girl singing her song.

The daffodils were dead; the timing was wrong. It was her, the girl in chiffon that had done something wrong. When the servers sounded the song, she realised that she was wrong. She had been too headstrong. Burned and red, well before it was dead and gone. She the girl in chiffon red, was the one in the wrong. Now her time would belong.

Daffodil seeds thrived too early in the cold. They told her that everything had gone. Intimidation of an elaborate setting, high winds of discontent. Age of sentiment passing with a seemingly passive course. Familiarity of providing comfort seeps into the moving harbour. Seeking cliffs that hang in the dry, prey of a step moves at one. Taking time to balance out the dye, not one belonged to question any but her.

The presence of one doesn’t make it hers, though the truth of time prevails at most, and intimidation is nothing but a fleeting sign. One that swallows with the grave, and that in best teaches one to behave. As a child, she used to think that love was laughter, but now she knows it is so much more. It is heartbreak, lies and betrayal. It is the awakening of enemies with ale, it is the seed of bitterness and war. It is really now nothing at all.

The room is dim around her and things blur in confusion. Camille didn’t know where she was at first, but as her eyes focused she could see she was back in her childhood bedroom. It was the night before they sent her away before. She felt the gun and the heart-shaped locket in her hand. She wanted to scream, to scream and say no, sorry it wasn’t her! She was only following orders!

The clock turns on the hour, they watch my face waiting for my reaction, but they cautiously avoid my eyes. A soft beating of jazz plays in the background, as if a party. The ticking gets nearer. A hundred seconds to midnight. This time now we dance. We dance in a stranger’s hands. For the time is theirs and ours, and our feet drum to a collected pattern of theirs.

She had loved once before. But it had been treated like the wind. They had made her this way. As if she was an invention of a brilliant find but it was something brutally unkind. Truth forgotten is just noise on blank paper.

She looked at the doll as its cold eyes stared back at her. She placed the locket where the dolls heart would be located, and closed it shut. She felt a tingle rush through her, and it felt like a human touching her skin. She moved the dial of the heart clock back and felt herself breathe. She had started the fire, but she would bring back the light. By tomorrow’s dawn, they became all but weak, and glory of the morning, did not rest until the long winter was finally gone, everything else was finally dawning, and the hands went back. She could re-wind the clock.

And it was no longer a hundred seconds to midnight.

She smiled.

The gun fired.