The Clock

He stared back at it and it stared back at him. His imagination seemed to impose itself on the blank page, where characters, settings, and worlds seemed to breath and live and die every millisecond and then were surpassed by the next. The room was cold and he liked it that way. A long time ago a fellow writer had told him that the cold was the best place to write and to be inspired because the cold was oppressive.

    “And in this oppression a mind either succumbs or rebels, and in rebelling creates something beautiful,” he had said.

    He was succumbing.

    His eyes rose to the old clock that lay on the wall above him. His father had said the same clock had been in the family for generations ticking through the lives of millions of people and not stopping for anything. In his life however it had stopped once, when he was a child coming back from 6th grade. He had walked up to his room, the events of the day whirling around in his adolescent mind and had casually glanced up at the clock. 1:15. The hands of the clock had frozen on the time and looked as though they were struggling with all their might to break free. He remembered how his face had contorted and his thoughts became frantic and distraught. The hands of the clock had been ticking above him all of his life and now they were trapped in time. He had thought that the world had stopped, that he was living inside of a moment and that he couldn’t escape. He had tried to scream but his vocal cords too were stunned and refused to obey him. So he had stood, mouth gaping and face contorted at the sight, of a world stuck at 1:15.

    Later his dad took the clock to be fixed and the next day it was back in its original place, the hands being freed and ticking happily again. His dad had told him that his friend John had repaired the clock and for many years following he believed that John had truly saved the world, having unfrozen time and allowed life to continue to progress.

    It was 12:48 now and many, many years later. John had died of natural causes a few years back and it had been a wonderful funeral. He had went up to speak and thanked John for unfreezing time and his wife had cried at that. Afterwards she had come up to him and told him that John had told her about fixing that clock and how glad he was to help something that meant so much to his family. She died later that year and was buried next to John.

His parents were buried the same way and had both died of natural causes awhile ago about a year apart from each other. He remembered sitting in the hospital with both of them with tears welling in his eyes and dried tears staining his face. His mother had went first and she went smiling. As she lay in that bleached and sterilized room she had looked at him with eyes full of the most caring love. The love only a mother can have for a son, an incorruptible love that somehow brought every moment of love between them together and was still greater than any past moment or even all of them put together.

“I love you mom.”

She smiled, a blissfully and soft smile, closed her eyes and laid back. He hugged her body and was truly embracing her soul, and that soul embraced him one last time and went on.

His father had been a different story. He hadn’t seem him since his mother’s funeral and had finally gotten word after it was too late to do anything but wait for him to die. An angry storm was raging over a remorseful sky and the rain had fallen like tears on his head as he walked into the emergency room.

“Harold Pugh?” he asked a pretty lady at a desk.

She scanned the record with a well-manicured finger and finally found the name.

    “Room 5C,” she said, “you better hurry.”

    He did.

    What lay on the other side of 5C was an almost unrecognizable man. His father had let his hair grow to be unruly and tangled and it was evident by his patchy beard that he hadn’t shaved in days. His clothes were in tatters and the boots he had on had decomposed to the point of being obsolete. The worst thing though was his physical state. This man, whom he had come to know as being a symbol for masculinity and strength, had receded to a feeble and seemingly emaciated state. His barrel-chested wide frame had gone and now he was wiry and frail, so thin in fact that he thought that he could pick his dad up if he had to.

Harold Pugh gave his son a weak smile as he entered that seemed to be an immense physical struggle for him. His heart broke at the sight.

“Dad, what happened?”

Tears welled up in the man’s eyes as the corners of his mouth trembled. He knew the answer before he spoke.

“She left Michael, and I couldn’t go on.”

The statement sent powerful waves of emotion through Michael’s body, emotions he wasn’t ready for and hadn’t encountered before. If pressed he would’ve called it sadness but it was much more than that. It was like seeing someone slit their wrist and understanding why. And truly that is what had happened, his dad had just let life bleed him out and he allowed it to suck everything out of him.

“It wasn’t your fault Dad, it wasn’t anyone’s fault,” he said tears unconsciously pouring from his eyes.

“I could’ve given her more, I could’ve given her something, I could’ve given her my life I would’ve given her anything,” his dad said staring into his son’s eyes.

In his eyes he had seen a boundless love like his mother had shown him, but in these eyes the love was different. The love was streaked his the black tinges of loss and remorse and regretfulness at every mistake. In his eyes a love that reaches out to hold and embrace something that isn’t there anymore. So that love tortures itself by remembering its object and with tears in its eyes once again reaches out to hold its object and it once again holds nothing and the cycle moves on. His dad had been living in that pitiful cycle every second since his wife had passed on and his body had finally had enough. As he stared back into his father’s eyes he understood it all and he hated it all.

“Dad…”

Just then his father’s eyes had become wild and frantic like Michael’s eyes when he had discovered that time had stopped. His head searched manically and he seemed to forget where he was or who he was. Finally this wild gaze landed on Michael and froze on Michael, his father’s mouth gaping open in fear and confusion. He couldn’t bring himself to close his father’s eyes or even touch him and simply backed away with his arm out putting distance between him and that lifeless body. A scream rose to his mouth but it was once again noiseless and he continued to back away, a confused and scared child. Michael at that moment became part of that vicious cycle, his love lost and scared and sad.

The paper in front of him was style blank but a couple tears had stained the blank sheet. He looked once again at the clock.

1:15.

He wondered if it would’ve been better if the world had been frozen all those years ago. For now it certainly seemed so.