Steel ribs cage the beast. Burst free, my enemy! Reveal yourself to the world! A ridiculous proclamation born of a ridiculous man. I splutter out like a wetted candle. Exertion meets exhaustion, as steam rises like ghosting breaths. Only the melancholy escapes, grey plumes of inner me. The shell remains untouched, unlike the damaged mind which reaches tendrils of self deep under a paper epidermis to ink out everything they touch. Dark, they are, seeking crimson warmth and love, an extension to this endless pain. A revelation. A blunt gift. The inner me is my enemy. I repeat this patient mantra. But the cage is unbending and the will behind it raw. After all, is passing not for blurring speedsters, or those avoiding the view? I have neither a view nor the time in which to travel. This heart thuds an agreement when I would wish It a stone-cold death.
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I’ve now been writing for a long time, and it gets harder to manage each year. So, in an unusually technological step, ‘for me, anyway’, I’ve opened a ko-fi donation page. Every little helps to fuel the dream. I shall try my best to post some really good short stories and the like as a thank you.
Here is a short fiction about time and its passing.
Unnecessary Adjustments
Pain and anger. Neither holds sway. Every tick both antagonises and coagulates in equal measures.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
I dissipate in perfectly well-measured moments. Not a one longer than the next, nor the last. Like the clacking Newton’s Cradle with its five silver balls, the one positioned exactly central on my wooden desk beneath the workshop window, they regulate my demise. I hope I aren’t the ball in the middle. I prefer the outside and a quicker escape.
Demise? A bit dramatic, I hope.
I know all these facts. There is nothing else to know, only this: Who regulates said demise? That’s what I want to know. Need to know. Have to know! I cast my mind back, but it comes back clueless.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
The first few days are an adjustment. The rest of the week is an experience. Week two gathers the information listed above. Week three adds momentum. This isn’t because of things changing — they never change — just to my resolve hardening. If I’m going down, I’m taking my tormentor down with me. Big talk for a man who’s never thrown a punch in his life.
I count everything from the bird calls in the presumed morning to the chirping cicadas in the expected night. The minutes of each day become an exact science. Food and drink aren’t involved; I’ve had neither since my arrival. The spectral fog that fills the room as drips of moist mist intensify; it is the only thing that has changed. So, this is where I will have him, or them, whichever applies, and shall practise at least a degree of revenge.
The whitening light becomes my fixation, the semi-permanent darkness an ignored anomaly.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
I tire. This is the truth of it. I have let my guard down just once.
She appears like an oncoming vehicle in a car’s fogging headlights. A smudge. A shape. Darkness where lightness has roamed. This is her entry into my nightmare. Not a man at all!
“Who…?”
“You know my name,” she breezes.
I freeze. I do know it. I just kind of hope she doesn’t know mine.
“Come,” she says.
“Must I?”
“You did well. Better than most. What others fail to accept, you have adapted to in carefully observed increments.”
“I ticked into death.”
“Ticked towards Death,” she corrects.
“How…?”
“Best you don’t ask. Just know I’ll take care of you. That’s all that matters at the end.”
End! I aren’t in total agreement with this, but what choice do I have?
So, I take her proffered, skeletal hand and allow her to lead me away from the light in a total reverse of all the presumed theories. It hurts not one bit.
The ticking stops.
The other side requires no adjustments. I roam free. I glide. Time and space and family and life and death, all such real-world things are pointless here. No adjustments required. No tweaks at all.
For a clockmaker, it is quite the revelation.
End
As always, thank you for reading, and for your continued support.
Forgive me if I write this note in blood, for I have no ink with which to stain these pages. Thus, I pour myself upon them for you. Everything is for you.
My arteries have an endless supply of the stuff, even if it is not always my own, rich and unctuous. I would prefer the midnight depths of black, but what choice do I have? This place is ill-lit and blood shines brighter.
People take notice when words stand out from the crumpled, milk-white pages of another ruined book. They eye them not with the same suspicion as leaking red, but as though written by a doctor, important and necessary etchings. I am not a doctor, though. Nor am I necessary. I have been told this my entire life.
It has taken so long to slice the required vein, to drain myself, that I have now lost the will to write. I could record my voice, shout even, but the written word is so much more preferable. Dickens’ and Shakespeare’s works would not carry the same kudos if unavailable to the masses. Damn this endless malaise!
Hours have slipped past. I have no words left to impart. Unless I have, and you read them already, here and now. But words must carry details, information, promises and rewards. These words carry only doom. I apologise for this. Doom is in my nature.
I close the book. Stitch up my wound. Mire in melancholy just a little longer. But time is something I have, and it avails an afterthought.
I reach up from the depths and twist a star; they never like this. The brilliant beam of molten silver this act avails makes it all worthwhile. I step out into this mercury spotlight and steal said luminance. Or displace it, I’m unsure which?
Only light reveals me, for I am the darkness it would otherwise banish. Light is always the key, not words, nor books, nor me. And I realise as I hum a tune to the other so high above that I don’t need to leave a note. I am not required to forewarn you. Eventually, we shall meet regardless, and you and I can share as many words as we want for as long as we want. Or not.
I bow to Eternity. I wave to Infinity. Neither wave back. I then depart stage down.
‘Death has left the building!’ I wish to scream.
Instead, I snigger at those pathetic fools I wished to please, to reassure, to inform. Death never leaves the building, you see. He, by which I mean me, just waits outside the door.
Now, I am home. I am bleeding freely, if inwards, not out. Perhaps I shall write about it. After all, I bleed only for you.
The whispers curled around his ears, like ivy around a tree trunk. They clung there, tightening in ever-increasing desperation, whispering non-stop, persuading. Even the rabid north wind couldn’t dissuade them, cool them, freeze the words on their lips, though it chilled Robert to the bone.
Living with ghosts. Don’t we all? Yet for some, they writhe more than others. He was born to them, for the last of his family gave her life to secure his. Didn’t she? Ghosts surrounded him from then on. Some were welcoming visitors. Others less so. No one saw them but Robert. No one heard them, nor him.
He realised the whispers were his own when the mirror failed to mist. It was bitter that day, and all those beyond the window exhaled ghosts. Robert, however, had no ghost to exhale, no spectre to coddle, no banshee at which to scream. He was merely a whitening shadow, who whispered to the stars and the moon.
He’d never been a baby. Not to his memory, anyway. Neither had he been a child, nor lover, nor husband, nor parent, nor endlessly aging old man. But he was, and that was something. Wasn’t he? He told himself this as the whispers became louder and his family, at last, said, Hello.
In other news, my collaborative work with the fabulous Gina Maria Manchego, The Poetry of Pronouns, has just had its second book accepted for publishing. As soon as we have a cover and more information I shall post them. A very big thank you to all who have enquired as to when this would be. Both Gina and myself have been overwhelmed by the responses to book one.
The Poetry of Pronouns, Too – Prose: She. He. They.
A big thank you to Editor Manuela Timofte for publishing my latest post to Gobblers and Masticadores. It’s always a pleasure to contribute to this wonderful magazine.
Richard M. Ankers - Storybook 
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