The cold blue yonder beckons like a frozen dream. Piles of ice extend into the air like pallid skyscrapers. Where they and the above meet, no one will ever know. Birds circle in tandem, reflected in the crystal-clear ice. Is it reflected or refracted, I forget so much these days? Whales peep from below to survey the commotion then vanish back into darker depths. Theirs is an ultramarine yonder, not the cerulean of my own.
I have seen things. I have known things. Things have both seen and known me. This is my doom. I recognise most and guess at the rest. Guessing is what humanity does in place of truly understanding. Some are just better guessers than others. I, however, have not the imagination to compete.
The journey was long, too long, if truth be known. My lips are almost as blue as the wall before me. My fingers and toes are closer to black. There are many stages of blue in this reality I term me. Only one is the truth.
I climb. I strike with the pick and kick with the crampons. I build to something massive. The sky remains a mystery during this duress. The wall remains intransigent. Regardless, I grit my teeth and pursue the dream.
Night falls in shades of turquoise, then azure, then aquamarine, then black. The wall of ice takes on its hints but not its promises of a dawn. I hurry now, scared of what might happen if I linger too long.
Time passes. Dreams fade. Stars emerge and die. A moon that is not mine slides across the ice wall like a skater, and is just as quick to leave.
I breach the divide as a tungsten dawn dissolves the black and stains the blue. I could spit; it angers me so much.
Breathe, I tell myself. Breathe, with all your might. And I do. And I shall. And I will forever more.
There are leaps of faith and leaps of loss. There are tumbles and stumbles and falls. I have fallen further than most. I have tumbled and stumbled and bumbled too long. Only in the purity of this misguided endeavour can I redeem myself. It is time.
She watches me from above and below. As the light of this cloudless new day, one of such a deep blue yonder as to defy comparison takes a hold of every other colour and throttles it from sight, she is everywhere. Glass upon glass. reflection upon reflection. I am engulfed.
We two are indivisible, seamless, the same. Two hearts. Two minds. One reason for being. At least, this is what I tell myself each day, as I pray to your form on this polished glass divide. Here, where the rain cannot touch us, and the stars never shine, we exist. In this in-between, we share our moments and span such time as can be recounted. Time! Oh, Time, how you betray us.
We two writhe when apart. We list like hamstrung battleships. There is no noticeable us then, though we still move together, breathe together, live in the same sacred space. Time reaches for us, but its intangible fingers can no more grasp our thoughts than we can. We are the dreamers, Time, not you. More, soon we shall wake and see each other, whilst you shall see only the past. Take that, Time! Yes, take that.
Indivisible, or so I claim. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, but we both bake. Fingers will point and tongues will wag. This is our doom. But we shall close our eyes and ears to the world. We shall brush aside the glass. Then there will be no dream, and time shall not matter. You will be there. So will I.
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.
Jonny scowled at the onrushing dusk and the miserable old uncle his wife had lumbered him with. The day had almost gone. He tried the philosophical method first, knowing the miserable uncle as he did.
“The night’s an empty, unwelcoming place, Uncle Frank, full of nothing and proud of it. There’s no colour, no warmth, no proof of life. It’s like it’s not even trying. Give me the sun any day of the week.”
Nothing.
Jonny sighed. “Anyhoo, the party’s moved indoors. Janine sent me to fetch you. ”
The uncle said not a word.
“Not coming? It is for you, you know! Oh well, suit yourself.” Jonny spun on his heels and headed back into the party tent, frustrated that Frank hadn’t even raised his ancient head.
Old Uncle Frank was alone with only his thoughts. He watched the sun singe the horizon before disappearing in a charcoal puff of smoke. Soon, the stars appeared, and then the moon. The night blazed a celestial welcome. And even though the party continued, louder if anything, he raised his craggy face and smiled.
“The night is all those things and more, my young friend. And we can all thank God for that.”
Photo by Joey Nicotra on Unsplash
The fade from dusk to permanent night passed in shades of doom. I deserved every bit of darkness, most men do, but was ever thankful for the moments before. I think it was a gift, a final farewell, an ‘at-least-he tried.’ And I did in my own way.
I had waited in my bed with the curtains flung wide. The window glass was dirtier than I would have liked, smudges like spectres haunting the pane, unmoving, critical of all I’d done. Yet, these questionable fractions of a life made torrid departed as the sun failed to illuminate them, blending into the background as I had for all my eighty years.
There’s a pivot, a hinging of self, when you realise, it will happen to you, it won’t last. All those years of pretending Death a visitor to others, slumped. Reality hit. An unorthodox life — a good word that, I always thought — for an otherwise pointless existence, was over. I gritted my teeth, said I was ready, glad to go. I was neither.
This moment came at ten o-clock one September evening as a bat whizzed past the glass, looped in a fluttering, flittering arc and came to rest on the outside ledge. It stood there on two legs like the world’s ugliest doll.
I squinted like the old fool I was, as if in doing so, the bat would disappear. But it didn’t disappear, not yet, anyway. The leathery creature tapped a tiny claw upon the glass to a perfect percussion, and then waved its almost transparent wing like a thrown shroud. I’d have ducked if I’d had the energy.
I was a skeptic and always had been. Omens were for others, and fate didn’t apply. I was beyond such things. People told of the ridiculous to bring false amazement to their otherwise inept existences. And, yet, here I was with such a story to tell, with no time to tell it and no one to hear it screamed.
The bat grinned as I shook my head, and then flew away.
I was a goner. I was about to meet my maker, or his darker self, if I was realistic. Bats did not do what the little one had, and chests only felt this much pain before they burst.
I contemplated pulling the telephone closer, stabbing those three particular numbers in an effort to save my skin, but instead, pushed it off the sideboard.
I settled into my pillows as best I might and watched the last light fade.
Everyone knew that dusk came in grey and left in black. There was no reason for any different. Still, I wanted to die with my eyes open. Closing them would give whoever found me something to do.
There was a mountain in the distance and a forest I couldn’t see. I imagined it all spiky haired spruces and pines, all ancient oaks and weeping willows.
That’s when the tears came. All the years I’d lived there, or rather inhabited the place, as I never really lived anywhere, and I’d never walked among them. What a pity. What a waste.
Every saline drop hurt to shed. Every slug-like trail stung my skin. Until it didn’t.
I woke with a start and a stab to the chest.
I was still in my bed and, if judged by the rasping breaths ghosting across my bedroom, alive. And yet…
Magenta moonbeams blazed from outside, filling my room with unnatural light. The night cringed at its brilliance, as did I. All those things, all those bits and pieces of paraphernalia accumulated in a tedious lifetime, be they sat upon shelves, the carpet where I’d kicked them, even the posters on the wall, shone in that rarest of colours. Not red. Not purple. A brilliance somewhere between what was never really seen in real life, yet everyone knew. This magenta moment was mine and mine alone. It was my colour. It was my gift.
I smiled.
I waved.
There was no reason for it other than unadulterated joy. The magenta light pooled in my eyes, coursed into my open mouth and into my lungs, streamed around my veins. There were no golds, no blacks, no lava reds, none of those colours associated with the world beyond. There was only magenta. There was only me.
They came through that bruise in forever, all those I’d known. They came because in age and befuddlement I’d forgotten, twisted, corrupted a life well-lived. I was never worthless, dangerous, useless or the rest, just long-lived, too long for the rest of them. There was my father, mother, brother and sister, too. Rebecca was laughing; she always laughed. There were classmates and colleagues, brothers in arms, sharers of medals and more. And somewhere at the back, there was you, Alice.
She wore magenta lipstick, my Alice. It accentuated her lips, distracted others from the beauty that was the rest of her. But not me. Not ever. I’d remembered it until the day I died. Just like I promised.
I once watched an artist paint the sky. His brush caressed the canvas like a lover’s kiss. His every fluent movement was poetry in motion. At least, I thought so. The painter did not.
Whether it was frustration, or a lack of imagination, who knew? But the fellow grew so incensed, he snatched each sheet from his easel and tossed them into the wind. There they drifted like enormous snowflakes off to decorate unfamiliar landscapes.
The trees provided shade and anonymity. These I used for hours. The painter remained unaware of my presence throughout. And although I couldn’t see what he painted, I took a certain satisfaction in knowing I would.
As the sun evaporated into the river in tangerine bursts, things changed. The poor fellow’s inability to capture what he wished gained momentum until, in one shrieking outburst, he threw his palette away. It landed upside down in the water.
I expected to see a brief flash of vermillion, perhaps a touch of violet, cerulean or emerald green; there was only black. The paint bled into the river like a cut vein during an eclipse. Spilled ink might have described it, but ink had a purpose and this did not. What a waste. What a terrible waste.
I clasped a hand to my mouth, but too late. The cough echoed into infinity.
The painter turned. He wept. Tears streamed from his old, rheumy eyes.
“I’m sorry,” I spluttered.
The painter looked right through me, right into my soul. His eyes took in my colours, my personal palette. He refused to stop swamping me in his sorrows. I feared we’d both drown.
When the sun disappeared below the horizon with a pfft of extinguished flame, only then did he look away. To heaven, actually.
“Ah,” he crooned. “Now I remember.”
“Remember what?” The words left my lips without permission.
“Raven. Her hair was raven. If only I’d not tossed my paints away. Ah, well!”
Head drooped and feet shuffling, the painter packed up his belongings and made to leave. He paused as the moon came out in mercury silvers, turned back. “Never forget what she looks like, young man.”
“I won’t,” I promised.
With that, he departed. I never saw him again.
I often looked back and mulled over his words. He’d seemed so genuine. But only as I too regarded her bone white features and robes of liquid obsidian, did I know who he meant. I couldn’t have captured her raven hair either, as her ebony eyes already held my own.
Richard M. Ankers - Storybook 
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