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The Clock

By Chloe D.

By Chloe DaltonPublished 3 years ago 3 min read
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The Clock
Photo by Majid Rangraz on Unsplash

The only company in the room is the metronomic tick tick tick of the clock across the room. Regardless of where I sit, I can see the red hand move at its unhurried pace around and around again. The single window provides a cold watery light, casting everything in grey, not unfamiliar to the feeling in the pit of my stomach. Beyond the dirty glass to the fields outside there’s an unnatural calm about the sway of the grass and silence of the skies. I’m reminded of a dying man taking his last breath unsure if it will be his last - wary to exhale. The birds that would swell in waves and blacken the sky with their small bodies have nestled into the trees or died. I miss the birds. It used to be the birds were my only friends, the only creatures in this place that understood me. Of course, I don’t blame them for retreating into the known when faced with an astronomical unknown. I can’t decide if it’s comforting knowing birds feel the fear too.

The springs under the flimsy mattress groan and whine with every shift of my weight. I used to find comfort in the unwavering screech - the remnants of childhood memory surfacing, smiling faces, and jumping on old motel beds. But the saccharine flavor of those memories turns to ash with the wailing echoes of my fellow prisoners, trapped not only by four concrete walls but the chaos the mind spirals into when left alone too long. Late at night the springs in my bed and the clock on the wall talk to each other, plotting against me, speaking ill of me, wishing me dead.

The gray concrete walls are silent, cold, unresponsive. They often have nothing to contribute to the whispers floating in through the crack of the door. They don’t care if I starve and waste away into nothing. Only the bed springs care, because without me, how would they hiss and spew anti-me rhetoric to the clock.

It’s been three days since the last meal was shoved through the slot in the door and I don’t expect another to come again. Before the news, we were fed twice a day on a 6-hour schedule. Tasteless grime to coat our stomachs and keep us slow. The day chaos erupted, the walls did talk. They spoke of an inescapable horror coming for this world, drifting in from outer space of a magnitude unimaginable to the human mind. They whispered of imminent death to all, to gather your loved ones, to say your last prayers. So everyone who could leave to be with their loved ones and say their last prayers. And we were left here.

The walls didn’t tell us when to expect our last breath, when to expect our bodies to be burned away on the impact of the celestial body colliding with earth. So, I watch the clock. The tick and tock around and around - tick tick tick.

I used to think the sound of a clock was that of a heart, that the repetitive thumps were mechanical and hollow. It wasn’t until I was much older I heard a heartbeat through a stethoscope and realized the deep woosh and thump of a heart could never be replicated in a device so meaningless as a clock. Time is a concept made up to control us, at least that what the last heart I heard beat besides my own said. She wore a heart-shaped locket around her neck and kept pictures of her parents in it. I wonder if she is with them now, like I am with my bedsprings and clock, waiting for the end.

humanity
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