The Unending Metronome
Kimi K2 (0711) and Davinci 002
The cylinder phonograph arrived in a box marked DO NOT TILT, though someone clearly had—wax cylinders scattered like driftwood, and one, she noticed, still turning slowly, powered by nothing she could see. She inserted her finger into its hole, afterward running her hands over the grooves, a little ways, watching carefully to ensure the cylinder didn’t lift off. There was something out there. She tried to figure out what. A tune, someone grinding or clearing their throat, or maybe just the crackle of a signal on the evening band. She held her breath, assuming the world’s trepidation was hers alone.
There was, no doubt, something out there. She arrived at this notion without effort, though she couldn’t explain how or why. She just sensed it, though there was nothing out there. She imagined the world as a kind of wall, transparent and invisible and separated from her by what separated night from day. She lifted her finger from the cylinder and watched the waves that often swelled up inches from her bed. The wall had nothing to do with winter. It was the dark itself that brought a feeling of neither solace nor belonging.
She crouched and looked out her blinds, saw the few scattered leaves twisting in the dark. She stood and lingered there at the threshold. Another permutation of life: her legs cast in shades of gray. She wore a heavy coat and furred hat and could still feel the warmth of friction. She removed now the coat and the hat and moved to the center of the room. Here, it’s a waiting game, she thought. So, how long is it now since the world turned again—the sun revolving, both our seasons tethered to the spin of the earth. The tides, which she felt reinforced it, seemed largely forgotten. She walked to the kitchen, turned back the clock 90 minutes and turned it back 60. She wondered why there had to be more than one. It was her imagination, she figured, that made days infinite.
Pop, pop, pop.
She stood upstairs, looking at her shadows, listening to the living room, to the dictations of the machine and of what she imagined to be dictations of others. Black pine branches under winter skies. She didn’t hear the cylinder anymore.
She put on her fuzzy jacket and went downstairs.
The cylinder had slid from across the room and was facing the window. Still spinning, though this time very slowly. Early morning passed unnoticed.
http://www.narrativemagazine.com/audio/original-fiction-jack-donovan
……..
i was waiting for you to walk
Never did you arrive but the unending metronome began to tick for two—a broken clock, or two clocks, both hollow and oily, and surely this was a sight unseen for you. I returned to stand on the hill the next night, but you were nowhere to be found, and the darkness settled down as we did yesterday—to sleep or not to sleep. I wrote out the seven p’s, but still the light contained within a pocket of nought. Your absence spoke for you, its strength dependent on the emptiness of the air between us. I also tried the nine V’s and the three W’s, but nothing seemed to hold the words together, or prevent my insides from getting mixed up.
I complained to the stars on the night that followed, laid out all my grievances, by which time the stanza of leaves that littered the path down which you didn’t come, the remains of their fall, had gone still, having slumped on their sides like dead crickets.
I walked around the stump and around the speed of light and then down some tracks that I hadn’t not known before, and then back again over bridges we had not crossed. I went around the bend and down the length of the tracks and pretended that just beyond the bend you were going to appear. And I disappeared.
Now, I stop by your place to whittle a boot shaped like one not unlike your foot. Or at least the state of it anyway. Or what remains of it when a boot that is quite unlike yours is what one is inclined to think belongs to you. The trembling snicker of the axe reminded me to curtail my empathy, otherwise it will only lead me to imagine the edges of things that are no longer true. A ring of stumps and circles and circuses made up of figures that no longer fall in line with any circumference.
The axe sinks, surprising me. I plunge in much deeper until the wood fails to react to the metal’s heated will. I absorb first the slowness of the night. Not the slow of a quiet, but rather one whose din creeps up behind you and before you realize it, gets inside you with a kind of slow water torture, hacking away what you think you may never need again.
I dig in.
The light settles in with me. Uneasy but all too familiarly wed to the night. My face stiffens and my eyes remain estranged and other. Open and exposed but not so open, and so alive, all of my transmission and still bound easily to the uncertainty of your where. _______________
*from time immemorial
**
addressing self and other
The room breathes like a dying person. But not our kind. She turns to figure in bed and shales off and throws up the window. Mind me the towing.
The carpet mute. The tilt in her cleaning vertigo. Green droning cicadas. She hears not.
Back to starting track: white matterless stare. Where breath.◆ About the ending
❧ About the title