Ticking

The old woman loved those clocks, they said. They would say that, they bought them after all. The youngest in the room didn't really care. He had better things to be doing, or so he said.

There must have been a hundred clocks, all with little birds or fake roses and daisies that pushed up through fake soil. Not one ticked with the other. It was like one giant mass of ticking, and it never stopped. Each clock was wound every day, painstakingly, by the oldest surviving woman in the family. She never hired anyone to do it for her. She never accepted digital clocks or battery clocks. She wanted cuckoos and Westminsters and Grandfathers. Every day, she dressed herself in pastel pink dresses that her dead husband bought her while he fought in the war, and a once-white hat with ribbons and tiny pink roses that was now a sickly yellow. Her hair was immaculate, thinning, but immaculate, and impossibly white. No one told her that Time doesn't stick around because there is a clock to indicate that he was there.

Every morning, right before winding her great-grandson's greatest headache, she listened to the BBC and drank her tea (milk, two sugars, please) and nibbled on a slice of toast with a ridiculously thin spread of orange marmelade. She had about as many books as clocks, but there they stood, unused since their purchase, in a dark library that only the cleaning lady went to. She believed the cleaning lady, Hortense, read her books. She didn't like it. She often threatened to fire her, every morning right after breakfast, but at the first cuckoo, she always forgot, and the day went on.

This morning, though, she had a little cough as she began breakfast. She went to bed directly, and called Hortense to call her family. She believed she was dying. She said she could feel it in her bones, she said to Hortense. There isn't much time.

Within the next hour, her son and her two daughters, with their wife and husbands and various grandchildren and their children all gathered in the outdated sunroom, drinking water and cucumber finger sandwiches. It was so hot outside. It was almost one in the afternoon, and already the atmosphere was yellow. The trees outside were heavy, like they just wanted to drop and die. The grass was messy and crunchy, and the flowers in the garden had lost life several weeks ago.

The air was sticky, like it didn't want to go anywhere, especially in somebody's hot lungs and nasty mouth. Someone put Pavarotti on the record player. There was nothing else to listen to, and everyone had left their houses so fast that they forgot their phones and music players.

The ticking was driving them insane, but that soon lost their attention as the neighbour, who was conveniently enough a doctor, entered the room. This had happened before. The old lady always thought she was dying. If someone thought that that was simply because she wanted to just get it over with, no one said anything. That wouldn't be too terrible to say. This time, though, the doctor looked like he was going to miss the ticking.

She's dying this time, he said to them, closing his wet-looking doctor's bag. He's very sorry. She is just so old, and she has had such a great life. Perhaps it's time to say goodbye, tell her you love her, the works. Everyone has to go eventually. He left as the crying began.

The youngest of the family, a man with no family of his own, didn't weep. The old woman hated him, he always thought. She always made him arrange clocks and pay the clockmaker when one broke. She never let him read her books in the back library, because she thought he'd steal them. You never read them, he would say, wondering to himself if she even knew how to read.Every member said their I love you's and goodbyes, and went back to the overcrowded sunroom. The youngest went in last, expecting a sharp comment to his un-ironed shirt and crooked tie.

The old woman smiled faintly, took his hand, and looked directly up at him. She was a disgusting old thing, with unreal eyes that pierced skin and mind. Her bed cradled her like some sick hammock because she slept in the same spot every night for sixty years without changing the mattress. She was wrapped in ugly pink sheets and quilts, with her imacculate hair placed carefully on a yellowed white pillow.

You were my favourite, she said. You were. I'm dying, so I promise I'm not lying. He smiled, and even she could see it was fake. Her smile grew. She remembered him, how he hardly talked and ate whatever junk she gave him. She knew everything about him, even while he was gone to university all those years ago, and when he moved away to the United States, and then back home. She was the one who gave him all his money, and he knew it.

You were my favourite too, he replied, kissing her hand.

He fought off a grimace and a gag. Her smile didn't grow and didn't shrink in size, but something was there. It gave him chills.

I know you love to read, she said. You always have, even when you were a tiny little thing. I put you in my will, you know. You'll love what I give you, dear. I truly hope you value it all.

His smile was so genuine, so childish. Her dying words gave her true joy. She died holding his hand, and he had to pry his fingers away in order to fetch the rest of the family.

☼☼☼☼☼☼

A few weeks later, the youngest returned to his great grandmother's house to collect what had been left for him. The lawyer had left a letter in his letter box that morning, and he had brought several cardboard boxes to take home all his new, antique books.

He didn't actually open the letter until he arrived. He knew what he deserved from that disgusting antiquity. Once he was inside, he went straight to the library... and nothing was left. Shelves and shelves of fantastic finds, out of print and impossibly rare- all gone.

He went into his great-grandmother's sitting room and opened the letter with his pinky finger.

The old woman had left him every. Single. One. Of her clocks.

The man jumped to his feet in rage as he read further. The lawyers would jail him if he broke any of the clocks, or if he harmed them in any way, or put them in any kind of danger, even if he wasn't the one doing the destruction.

As Hortense walked into the room, making her final rounds, she looked at the furious man and chuckled with her gravely voice from smoking cheap cigarettes all her life.


"She planned this, you know. She laughs. Every tick, she laughs!"