Ticking Thorns

This narrator has always heard ticking, and thorns are his only relief.

I wrote this for a contest at the beginning of this school year.  It's one of my favorites.  I specifically left the narrator genderless and the characters nameless.  I thought it worked for this story.  Read it how it comes--that's one of the fascinating things about these sorts of stories.  The interpretations can be so varied.

 

Picture credit to Angelo Cavalli.

 

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            Ticking.  I always hear ticking, always.  I can’t source it.  Some days it drives me into corners until I am pulling out my hairs one by one.  Usually I think I’m in private, but I’m later told I was at the train station or bus station or places like that.  I don’t even use public transportation, so I don’t really understand why I would be there.

            No medicine they ever gave me got rid of the ticking entirely.  Some made it worse, until I would bang my head against the wall and then be surprised later to find that some dried red-brown solution had wrecked the paint job of that beautiful, white-washed wall…  Others would lessen the sound, but those were worse.  It would sound like the ticking was coming through a thick substance or something.  Consequently, I would think I was in a big pool or lake or ocean of liquid.  People told me I acted as though I were drowning frequently, gasping for breath.  I don’t remember any of that.  It all disperses after I’m taken off the medication.

            I’ve lost a lot of memories that way, but I never forget about the ticking.  When I remember, I wear a watch so I can listen to the watch and let it mask the “fake” ticking people tell me I have.  When I explain my constant ticking, the white coats try to give me more medication.  They tell me it’s some big long set of words that basically means I make it up.  It sure sounds real to me.

            This week my sister took me to look at a house.  She wants to have somewhere to take care of me.  I try to tell her I can live on my own, but she doesn’t believe me.  She says our apartment is too small.  At one point she mumbled about blood stains scaring her, but I didn’t understand.  I think she also wants room for her boyfriend.  He isn’t very nice.  I’m glad he is afraid of me.

            Today is a Thursday.  I think Thursdays are lucky because it begins with ‘th’ and ends with ‘s,’ like my favorite word—thorns.  Also, Thursday has ‘thur’ at the beginning and that’s a lot more like thorn than anything Tuesday has in it.

            I thought today would be lucky.  I even remembered to take my medication by myself in the morning.

            When we got to the house the sun was shining.  I tried to stay out in the lawn and face the sun like a cross to absorb the heat, but Sister dragged me in.  I remember when she used to get mad at me for taking my clothes off to do that.  She slapped me.  She told me I was scaring the neighbors.  I scare a lot of people, she tells me.  Like her boyfriend.  But that makes me smile.

            The house was cold, and it reminded me of the sun outside purely because it was so opposite.  The man trying to sell us the house looked handsome in his well-cut suit.  Sister was giving him the pretty eye, but I think it was just so she wouldn’t have to pay him as much.  Even Boyfriend was being extra kind.

            “Go check out the bathrooms,” she tells me in a way she thinks is kind.  It hurts my ears.  I picture silk-coated knives driving through the flesh of my ear drums and shiver, hurrying out of the room with my head hung.  I go to the bathroom upstairs first because stairs are nice.  I try to bend my knees to 90 degrees as much as possible when going up stairs.

            The upstairs bathroom is warm.  The window is nice.  It looks down on a garden that I immediately love.  I could see myself spending a lot of time in here.  That is why she sent me to look at the bathroom: I spend a lot of time in bathrooms.  I like this one because it has a view of the garden and roses!  I love roses, because I love thorns.

            I check out the tub.  I love bathrooms because I love tubs.  I don’t know exactly why.  I think it is for how smooth they are, how cool in temperature, and how the water spins around when the last amount of it is leaving.  I get into the tub and touch the ceiling.  I enjoy being able to touch the ceiling from the tub.  It makes me feel powerful.

            I used to get yelled at by Boyfriend when he would catch me sleeping with a blanket and pillow in the empty tub.  He was uncomfortable by my spending so much time in the bathroom.  Once he punched the sink until his hand bled because he caught me sleeping in the tub naked.  I thought that was peculiar.  People in tubs are usually naked.

            I was checking each and every floor tile when Sister, Boyfriend, and House Person walked in.  She looked down at me and frowned.

            “What are you doing?”

            “I am checking the tiles,” I report.  Boyfriend snorts dully.  House Person pretends not to notice anything.

            After that speak-and-respond, I notice nothing else but a fierce ticking.  I realize I have forgotten my watch.  This ticking is worse than normal.  It is…  It is…

            “Real,” I say out loud.  “It is real.”

            “Yes, for God’s sake, the tiles are real,” Boyfriend spits.  He accidentally steps on my hand.  I pull it away, frown down at my smarting fingers, and look up at the three.

            “There is ticking.”

            “There is always ticking with you,” Sister informs me.  As if I didn’t know.  She adds, “It’s hard to believe you’re a full-grown adult.”

            I stand to my full height, which is taller than Sister and House Person but shorter than Boyfriend.

            Tick.  Tick.  Tick.  Tick.

            Regular intervals, one second period, one Hz frequency…  It sounds like a watch.  A big analog watch with a thick leather strap on a wrist that was too small and the strap needed another hole punched.  That is what I picture.  I search around the room, then out into the hall.

            Their voices are still working.  Sister calls down the lengthy passage, “Go look at the garden.”

            I do as she commands.  I ask her if she will join me, say that I am not comfortable with the ticking.  It makes me uneasy.  Something doesn’t feel right.

            She never trusts my feelings.  She says no, the garden trip is for me alone.

            I venture down the stairs in my normal fashion, look at myself three times in the mirror as I pass, and make my way out the back sliding door.  I remove my shirt to enjoy the sun, but not my under shirt.  Sister would yell at me.  I kneel next to the geraniums and flop down, smiling up at the bright disk in the sky.  I forget about the ticking at moments like these.  I forget about everything.

            I imagine being absorbed by the expansive green earth, pushed through currents in the deep blue sea, and forced up through soil to become a rose bush with petals and vascular tissue and thorns.  With that thought, I crawl to the roses across the yard at the petite white fence.  Sister will yell at me for dirtying the knees of my pants.  I don’t understand why she complains, when I do all the cleaning of clothes.  I sit by the washer and watch it spin for hours.  It is something I enjoy doing.

            These roses smell of Thursdays.  I like that.  I reach for one of the flowers, plant my hand behind it, and grab.  Two pains abruptly take over my senses.  I frown slightly, and then smile.  When I detach and remove my hand I have two dabs of blood, one that turns and runs down my hand.

            “Damn it, you, why do you always have to hurt yourself?!” Sister screeches.  She hurries to me to wipe the blood away and I hold my hand close.  She plops down next to me and crosses her arms, looking at the roses.

            “The thorns hurt me,” I tell her.  She turns her strikingly beautiful face to me and shakes her head, tears in her eyes.

            “I like the roses and the bathroom,” I continue.  “Will we live here, Sister?”

            She shrugs one shoulder delicately and looks to the sky.  I don’t know if she’s looking to the man she calls God or to the sun.  Maybe both, the way I look at it.  But she probably wouldn’t do that, because she thinks I’m insane and takes care not to do anything like I do.

            “You should get Boyfriend out of there,” I warn.  “That ticking isn’t good.  It isn’t the normal ticking.”

            She moves over and takes me into her arms.  I smile.  This is when I like Sister, when she cares for me.  Usually when Boyfriend is not around.  He gets mad at her when she cares.

            “He’ll be fine,” she tells me.

            That’s when his form crashes through the window.  He lands contorted in the sandy soil next to the foundation, blood the color of my rose petals running down his cheek.  His eyes are wide and inhuman.  I recognize the sight from my dreams.  He is dead.

            Sister stares on blankly, screaming silently into her hand and unsure of what to do.  My mind is not hurried or panicked.  I look up into the broken window and see the white-faced House Person, his arms still outstretched with his foot on the tub.

            I will never love that tub again.

            I push Sister forward, because though I don’t understand her and she is a mystery to me, I know that at the push she will react.  She catches herself before she falls, screams a blood-curdling howl, and runs to Boyfriend sobbing.

            I turn and all is silent.  I pull clippers from my pocket—Sister would yell if she knew I carried them—and snipped the roses.  The bathtub I would never love.  These roses, however, were now mine.

 

 

The blue suits caught the House Person.  He was what they considered a first-time murderer, with in-the-moment motive.  He didn’t know how to cover his tracks.  Apparently, he had become jealous of Boyfriend because Sister had given them both the pretty eye.  House Person had finally realized that only the eye she gave Boyfriend counted, and he had decided that meant he would never find someone to give him the pretty eye.  He had “snapped,” they declared.  “Snapped.”  Gone crazy.  They looked at me strangely when they said it.  I think they wanted to say House Person had Gone “Me.”

            House Person went through trials I don’t recall or care to name.  He is in jail now, which is like where I have been with less white-washed walls and worse toilets.  He cries often.  I visit him sometimes, but he just stares at me blankly.  I stare at him blankly.  Every time I wonder why I go, and every time I go back again.

            Sister stays in bed.  Her hair is matted and greasy.  When she looks at me, there is something peculiar in her eyes.  The doctor made a joke that it was insanity.  He smiled at me.  I have not looked at her the same.  Insanity in her eyes.  Insanity in mine.

            Now when she wanders the halls she looks at me sometimes.  Smiles a knowing smile.  In those moments, I know that someday she will be as okay as I am.

            She trusts that I can live on my own now.  I even care for her.  Someday we will care for each other.

            I still hear my ticking.  Medication still bugs me.  Sometimes, I am still told I bang my head to relieve or relive inner daemons.

            Now I have Sister with me.

            I will go now.  She wishes for me to shave her head and paint her room sky blue and canary yellow.  I think she is on the mend.

Reviews

[J.E. Stroud]

I absofuckinglutely adore this piece.