To Celebrate my new ko-fi donation page.

Authors Note:

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.

Richard

https://ko-fi.com/richardmankers

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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.

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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.

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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.  

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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

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As always, thank you for reading, and for your continued support.

Richard

https://ko-fi.com/richardmankers