An Hourglass

Short story built off the idea of the unsaid.

An Hourglass

 

The woman stands and pulls the curtains back from the window, the long dual-paneled thin glass in which her reflection stares pensively back and over her shoulder into the kitchen through which the first golden rays of that November morning shoot through, touching the tiled floor but not warming it. She pulls her robe close around her body, thin and shapeless, sharp only around the eyes--themselves sharp and observant, but cast in shadow--and with them she observes all that might be. She is known as the Hawk, perhaps because of this tendency of hers to watch, or perhaps not--her nose is rather long, hooked--her hair boasts a tawny sheen--her voice shrill--but the reason is of little importance. The Hawk, herself, is of little importance, in fact; and is acutely aware that she is. Which is why she observes--always looking for something that nobody else will see, something that will earn for her that which she has never found in herself.

     It’s there, she tells herself. Just there.

     Through her window, across the narrow two-lane highway that winds past where she roosts, on a slight rise of usually vibrant green grass and backcast with a forest so dense and distant that even to her avian eyesight appears indistinct, sits a small park. Right now it is empty. The grass is faded but wet and heavy with dew, the first light of the sun reaching over and around her house and those neighboring to catch there and shine like so many discarded jewels, to be taken or trampled upon--but probably the latter. Her gaze lingers here, on this park--to a place that is only just visible, a thin line of sun-bleached wood that raises itself above the crest of the hill; and she sees more than is visible to her eyes or any: a wooden bench, two of them, set one beside the other, just off a wandering path of dirt and gravel, some feet away from a small and natural pond. She knows it is there because she has seen it, sat beside it, allowed herself to be observed in the cool of it--for even a Hawk likes to make itself known once in a while. But she knows it for more reasons than this.

     Her hands grasp blindly to a nearby end table, whereupon a single camera of wistful origin sits, as if ready to capture whatever secrets she is sure must exist, and by which she has determined to validate her otherwise hapless rookery. But they stop, or rather she stops them--as one might an unconscious whim--and brings those fingers instead to her lips, parched in their youth, dry and untouched but like this. She turns, thinking she hears something from the hall--and thinking further that she sees something, begins to walk that way.

     Just then, a shiver rises up through the cold hardwood beneath her feet, through the threadbare slippers that she was given once as a present from a boy she thought was interested in her but who was merely interested in laughing with his friends behind her back about the design those slippers once displayed, of wild eyes and wings down either side. She knows about the laughter now, and wears them still though the designs have faded, the eyes fallen out. She pulls her robe tighter. The coffee pot plays a jarring jingle, and she redirects her observation in that way, forgetting about the sound and the movement--having likely imagined them in the first place.

     She reaches for a coffee cup, one of a hundred she has collected from places she’s never been or would go, but pretends she might; and as she pours the thinly brewed liquid into its bowl, she spies a tiny black shape wiggle its way out from behind and outlet.

     ‘Ants,’ she mutters, as if it’s some kind of curse. Which, of course, ants are.

     Sometime later, the phone rings. She makes of herself of fine display in getting up, walking as hurriedly as decorum might allow, flaps her arms lightly under that robe, and lifts the receiver from its hook. The year is 2018.

     ‘Hello?’ a voice sounds from the other end, a male voice. ‘Is this Mrs. Williams?’

     ‘Who’s calling?’ she answers, her eyes squinting along with the question, as if to direct their peculiar talents through the very phonelines. The voice replies, and the Hawk merely nods.

     ‘I don’t know anyone of that name,’ she replies. And when the voice seems willing to go on, she repeats herself, this time punctuating the statement by replacing the receiver and finishing her coffee. As she sits, she picks up a single business card from the table and reads the name written thereupon--wondering what kind of a name that is, anyway.

     The radio comes to life--a quick crackle of energy gives birth to a voice far too lively and rambunctious for the Hawk’s liking…or so one might think. She however shows no disdain for this voice--no interest, either--but merely acknowledges it, as one might a clock sounding the hour. Perhaps it is the same in the Hawk’s droll roost. She sips from her cup one last time, then places it in the sink; and, after glaring warning at the unconcerned (but curious) little ant, she strides slowly, confidently, across the living room and once again pulls back the curtain and begins to observe. There is life now, in the street--cars moving this way or that, people walking along the sidewalks, dressed for work or from pleasure perhaps (she likes to imagine what pleasures, having some vague idea of the concept), and right on time a single school bus passes by in the southerly direction, stopping several doors down. The voice on the radio speaks happily of a settling fog, an inversion. Gives the time as 7:41. And across the street, at the crest of that grassy hill, sitting atop the only bench visible from her perch, is a little girl. Looking over her shoulder and to the left. Watching.

     Ah, thinks the Hawk, grasping for and taking up that small camera at last, advancing the film. Now I’ve got you.

 

In his room on the attic floor of a one and one-half story building two houses down from the Hawk, sleeps a boy. A line of gray morning light stretches from just below the shade across his young, smooth features that, though age does not yet trouble them, something does; for as he sleeps, as sleep fights to keep him, as the morning falls and threatens to wash away the amnionic embrace of slumber, his face shows all the signs of being troubled: eyes that move rapidly behind closed lids; lips that twitch, part, and shape words that never sound; and pain, or something very like it. He is dreaming, but his dreams are not the untroubled frolics of a youthful mind; instead they are a mystery, a terrible darkness, and the coldness of a winter that is not quite fallen yet never thaws--an inner frost.

     The alarm sounds--or an alarm does, and very much like the voice of his own mother. Which it is.

     ‘Brendan!’ calls that alarm, ‘Brendan, you’re not up yet! Come on, you’ll miss it if you’re late and you’re too big for me to carry down the stairs anymore!’

     His eyes part, slow and bleary, the lids of one sticking together. His room, a fog of indistinct shapes and images; his mother’s voice an odd, alien sound. He reaches for the clock he keeps on a table by his bed, or tries to--his arm is lifeless, dead from having been slept on, and so he uses the other and by force throws the first arm out of the way and rolls over. The clock reads 7:26, MON. He mutters a curse, or something that an eleven year old boy might use for one--which is likely worse.

     Opening the blind, he glances out onto the street below, the people walking as it were right below his nose; the fog is denser in the area surrounding his vantage, and the town seems to disappear into it in all directions, or perhaps to be merely unfinished. There is nothing but the park, those two lonely benches and the pond. The hazy outline of trees beyond. He realizes that he is very cold, still, from the dream.

     ‘Didn’t anyone ever teach you how to dress?’ his mother asks him, ever critical, as he sits himself at the breakfast table. There is a second plate set beside his. Without a glance upward he replies that, yes, somebody had, and that somebody was her. It no longer carries the barb it once had, when the boy began dressing himself some years ago--many years it seemed now--but the morning doesn’t quite seem complete without it.

     She stands over him, fussing his hair; he pretends to pull away.

     In the far corner of the little kitchen, a small radio bursts to life. His mother walks over to turn it off, then looks once more at the clock, ignoring the calendar beside.

     November the 12^th.

     She peers through the window, down the street northward, into the fog.

     ‘It’ll be here in two minutes, Brendan. Have you got everything?’

     ‘Yes, mom.’

     ‘You remember you have club after school today?’

     ‘Yes, mom.’

     ‘Don’t dawdle around and miss the activity bus this time.’

     ‘Yes, mom.’

     ‘If you do, though, call me. Especially today.’

     He pauses in his eating, momentarily.

     ‘I don’t like you walking anywhere in this fog,’ she explains, and he starts eating again.

     ‘Yes, mom.’

     ‘Are you even paying attention--oh, it’s early again. Come on, Brendan, take it with you.’ He grabbed what remained of his breakfast and allowed himself to be kissed since the front door was still closed and no one could see; and because no one can see, he doesn’t have to wipe it off.

     The bus pulls away, and she follows its progress into the inverted soup, clutching her shoulders against the cold. As she turns to go back inside, her eyes move involuntarily to that place across the road, and that empty park bench.

     ‘A lovely morning, Mrs. Edison, isn’t it?’

     She turns, and looks slightly down from her doorstep. A small man stands there, mittoned, wearing a thick gray coat and coverings over his ears, but his head bald and shining the sun’s rising, muted light. She begins to reply, but sees another man standing beside him--a taller man, though stooped, with a strange and knowing look. This man does not speak, but smiles only. Unlike the first, familiar man--who is the local baker (retired)--he does not seem to mind the cold.

     ‘How do you do?’ this man inquires; she nods in reply.

     ‘A bit chilly,’ she supplies, without thinking.

     ‘It’s the damned fog, always this time of year…’ the baker (retired) opines; and with that the conversation has ended.

     She watches them disappear in the opposite direction, and then goes back inside to put his plate in the dishwasher.

 

‘You may go now, Mr. Edison.’

     Brendan puts the cap back on the marker and sets it down, looking cursorily at the lines he had finished writing. I will not put ranch dressing on students chairs as a prank, not grammatically correct, and possibly not the required fifty times, but the board is full and the teacher is tired of the smell. He’s a small man, young in a relative sense, hair parted to one side and held in place by some grooming gadgetry unrelated to the otherwise feminine accoutrement called hairspray. His mouth when it smiles forms a kind of triangle that points downward; his teeth almost too white.

     ‘Don’t dawdle, Mr. Edison,’ he adds, his voice drawling and mousy, the hint of a lisp. The word he uses (‘dawdle’) calls to mind the warning Brendan’s mother had given him earlier that morning; and the boy throws his pack over his shoulder and scampers off to the covered area where the activity bus waits to shuttle the various club goers home.

     ‘Don’t run in the hallways, Mr. Edison…’

     Don’t, don’t, don’t thinks Brendan--thinking this world is too full of the word, hearing it not only in his teacher’s voice but his mother’s, in every mother’s, every adult’s, and in a voice that he can’t quite place but that perhaps he hears in his dreams. He rounds the corner and runs headlong into the school counselor, who tells him ‘Do watch where you’re going.’

     He arrives at the covered area in time to watch the red brake lights of the bus fade around the corner of the school building into the fog. His own breath, a fog before him. Sweat lines his brow, and though he feels the warmth of exercise, his body shivers and he remembers something, the ghost of it. Then he turns away and goes into the old building, into the office and asks to use the phone. There is no answer, and he doesn’t try a second time.

     ‘Would you like a ride?’ one of the high school teachers asks. He recognizes her by face, but can’t remember her name. She reminds him of his strange neighbor from two houses down, who everyone calls the Hawk.

     For a moment he stands still, as if thinking about her offer. Really he is listening to the sound of a basketball bouncing against the wood floor, the squeal of sneakers, the well-known and hoarse shouts of the coach--all muted by the closed doors of the gymnasium that they both stand beside. Trying to imagine himself inside, older. For some reason it eludes him, the future--the thought of it.

     He finally shakes his head. He lives close enough, he says--looking away and toward the front of the school, through the trees that spring up there and which that morning the Hawk had viewed from her living room window as dense but indistinct. A trail runs through those trees, he knows, and winds through the park, which is right across from where he lives. He’s taken it before.

     The teacher looks at him as though unconvinced, but knows also that she has no authority to force the boy into her car. He’s just like Ashley, she thinks to herself--Ashley being her own son, in college now but as a boy so reckless and brave and adventurous and several other things that she was wrong about because Brendan was none of them.

     ‘Be careful,’ she says to him, ‘and try to keep warm. Watch out for cars. And don’t catch cold, you hear?’

     Always a don’t.

     She watches him through the rectangular glass windows of the front door, a small an indistinct shape slowly becoming one with the fog, smiling. Just like Ashley.

 

All day long, the girl sits on that bench in the park, not feeling the coarseness of the wood, barely conscious of the fog. The long hem of her white dress is tucked primly under her legs, which are just long enough that her sandaled toes brush against the dewy grass as they swing slowly back and forth. As if keep time, or marking its passage--like clock’s pendulum, but in silence.

     And in that silence, she thinks.

     The park is empty. In such weather, that cannot be much of a surprise, but even were it not, it’s fair to wonder whether the girl would notice. Or be noticed, herself. Of all who pass by the park on the sidewalk, traversing the fog in pursuit of some daily errand or exercise, not one of them turns her way, calls out to the lonely girl or says hello, asks if she is not cold, why is she not in school. But for the Hawk across the street, one might wonder if she was there at all.

     The light begins to fade, and in the rapid manner of a November day the evening draws close. The girl shudders, for the first time feeling the cold--but it is a different kind of chill, not drawn from the foggy air but withdrawn from someplace inside, the cold candle that flickers in her tiny, six-year-old heart. She can feel the night settling in.

     Sensing movement, she looks up, away from the pond into which she’s spent the day gazing--not at the pond, actually, but at the images the played there, memories, projected onto that lurid stage in silent repeat. Specters.

     She sees the boy emerge from the fog, his head bowed against the cold, hair rustling in the breeze; and so seeing she reaches one hand to her own hair, as if to see that it dances as well. He looks older, she thinks--only a little, perhaps, but older. When the boy is close, she stands--she makes no conscious decision to do so, but finds herself upright, watching him, wanting him to raise his eyes and look at her, to not pass her by again. To smile, if not to speak. No…speaking would be too much.

     After all, she thinks, what words could he say to me, or me to him? Imagining those very words in response, she shakes her head in a sudden, frantic flurry, closing her eyes, wishing the boy and herself away.

     When she looks again, he has stopped. He sees her, at last--looks at her as if unsure, as if he has never seen a little girl before, frightened. The moment seems fragile, to them both. Neither has the courage to speak, or even the words had they it. His gaze moves down from her small, dark eyes to the parcel that she holds under one arm. As if only remembering it then, herself, she looks down to. It is a blanket, handmade, a bit weathered, the color bleached perhaps from washing--a cherished thing, without question.

     The girl holds the blanket with both hands, toward the boy, her eyes lowering to the ground, seeing herself and him reflected in the pond; closing her eyes.

     ‘You…you want me to…’ stammers Brendan, stepping gingerly toward the girl, not wanting to frighten her, not wanted to shatter what feels so much like an illusion in the fog--a precious, warm illusion. ‘You want to give it to me?’

     She nods, unable still to speak. Not trusting herself to, knowing her words would betray her, knowing they would do him harm. Why should they do any different, now? 

     But there is so much…

     The weight of the blanket disappears from her hands, and at the cold brush of his fingers against her own, she feels some greater weight go with it. Though her eyes remain closed, she can feel them forming at last, the tears of so many days and nights, the lonely hours spend sitting on this bench, the waiting, and the cold.

     ‘Hey…’ Brendan begins, watching her, not understanding the trouble of his own heart, much less hers. A car passes along the highway behind him, and he remembers home and mother and the trouble he was bound to find himself in, and the don’ts. ‘Listen…I better get going,’ he says, somehow reluctant to follow through. ‘Do you live close by?’

     The girl nods. Yes.

     ‘Do you want me to walk you home?’

     The girl shakes her head. No, not now.

     He lingers. ‘Are you sure you don’t need anything? I don’t like leaving you all alone…’ The words embarrass him even as he speaks them, and yet somehow he doesn’t mind the embarrassment. ‘I live just over there, across the street. If you… I mean..’ His voice trails, the wisp of his breath chasing it away into the darkness, to nothing.

     The girl turns her head up, opens her eyes, and looks at him. Stepping forward, she pulls gently on the sleeve of his jacket, pulling his face close to hers, kissing his cheek. He quickly looks around to make sure that no one is looking; and, not noticing the Hawk, chooses to leave the kiss right where it is.

     Without another word between them, the boy backs away, watching the girl as if afraid to lose sight of her; and then reaching the edge of the park, he turns and crosses the street, going home.

     She watches him until there is nothing left to watch. A light goes on inside the boy’s house. She sits back on the bench, feeling suddenly very cold. Her thoughts project themselves once more upon the surface of that lurid pond, and once more the tears spill from her eyes. A wind blows through the park, dancing her hair, disturbing the fog.

     ‘Don’t hate me, anymore…’ she whispers, but to whom she whispers it, perhaps even she cannot say.

 

The house is empty. Brendan wonders if this is to his good fortune, or a sign of worse trouble yet. But there is nothing he can do about it, a young boy on his own; and being a young boy, he very quickly forgets the question in favor of something to eat. He sets the blanket on the kitchen table, turns the television on and opens the refrigerator door; the cool air envelops him, and he only then realizes how warm he had been. He thinks about the girl; but a quick glance through the living room window tells him that she has left the park for home. What a strange kid, he thinks, pulling out last night’s meatloaf and sticking it in the microwave. While the microwave drones, the sound of the newsman interrupts his otherwise absent mind: …and reports are coming in of a sudden change in… 

     The door opens; only then does he notices the headlights from his mother’s car shining in the driveway. The microwave dings at almost the exact moment she enters. He watches for any sign of trouble, but she removes her coat and pulls off her shoes and shivers from the cold and puts on the kettle and does all the things she normally does when coming home at night, doing them normally, and he begins to feel as if he will live to become older, after all.

     ‘How was club?’ she asks, not a shred of implication in her voice.  Then, ‘Sorry I’m late. There was something I had to do, and the fog had everyone slowing down. Meatloaf? Maybe I’ll have some, too.’

     ‘It was good.’

     ‘What?’ She stops, looks at him quizzically. ‘What was good?’

     ‘Club. You asked how club was. It was good.’

     ‘Oh…right, I did ask. I hope--’ Her voice stops, like that of a radio when the cord gets pulled from the wall. He can feel the silence, it shakes him--feeling something is wrong, but not guessing what. Then he notices her eyes, and the blanket, and the paleness of her face; and though he does not recognize it for what it is, the terror.

     Instinctively he gets up from his place at the table, his meatloaf mostly finished, and grabs the blanket, running upstairs with it--all before she can utter a single word, gone before she has even looked away from the place where it sat. As if frozen, the world frozen or she in it, the newsman droning on from a very faraway place, his words muffled, distorted, as though sounding from the bottom of a pool: something about the fog.

     ‘Bren…dan…’ Her voice sounds weak, barely more than a whisper. Slowly, like a stone statue coming to life, she forces her steps to the bottom of the stairway.  ‘Brendan…that blanket,’ she pauses, thinks to herself, searching for words. What words, though?

     ‘It’s mine, mom. It’s mine, don’t worry about it.’

     ‘But where…where did you get it?’

     ‘Someone gave it to me. Why, what’s the big deal?’

     What’s the big deal.

     ‘It’s from club, I got it in club,’ he lies, not much of a liar usually but lies now and knows he must. For him, and for her.

     ‘From club…?’

     ‘Yeah. It’s just some dumb blanket,’ he says, holding it close, remembering the girl and the warmth of her, her kiss on his cheek--feeling it in the cloth, the cloth made of it. If he told the truth, he’d have to tell about getting kissed--and there are some things no boy of eleven can ever admit. He throws the blanket over himself, not wanting her to come up. Not wanting to lose the blanket.

     She stands at the bottom of the stairway, looking up--looking somewhere else, entirely, somewhere that he was something much different than he is now, and she also different, but the house the same, the baker the same (not retired), and the Hawk and her slippers, the street and the park…

     Mechanically, she cleans his plate. There is another set beside it. She then goes into the living room and sits herself in front of the television, not seeing it or hearing the newsman or even caring about the sudden change in the local wind patterns, the fog lifting. The window stood open, the park visible but nothing in that park visible now, all covered in darkness.

     In the corner of the living room is an old sewing machine.

 

‘Yes, have him call me back,’ says the Hawk, staring through the thin glass of her living room window, camera at her side now but the film spent, squinting against the darkness at the place where she knew that bench must still be. ‘I’ll be here.’ She pulls her robe tight around her shoulders; having changed earlier at the surprise visit of Rodgers the old baker, it now covers a thin sweater, checkered and tawny like her hair, worn like her slippers. She sets the phone back on its receiver and goes back to sit by the window; but only for a moment, as the phone rings once more and the Hawk jumps sprightly to her feet, expecting his voice.

     ‘Oh, Mrs. Edison, good evening,’ she says, disappointed. She listens while the other talks--taking very long to say very little. ‘Yes, I did call earlier, about a half hour ago, I suppose. That’s right.’

     She waits again, thinking how impolite it is to speak so slowly.

     ‘Yes, it was your little Brendan, I’m sure it was. Right there in the park, I watched through my window. Yes, that’s right…a little girl, strange thing wearing a white dress is all. Yes, she handed him something, it was folded up like some kind of bundle--it might have been a blanket, sure. Now that you mention it, sure, it might have been.’

     Silence. She can hear Mrs. Edison thinking from over the phone line, imagine her just two houses down, really imagine her--on today of all days, probably standing in front of that gaudy calendar of her. So terrible…but I do wish she’d let me go, thinking that he might not give her a third chance, knowing he was a man on the move.

     ‘Thank you, Helen,’ says Mrs. Edison at last, in a voice so stripped and lifeless the Hawk nearly forgot that she was expecting another call, wanting to say something, just never knowing what.

     Before she could think of anything suitable, the line was dead; and she stood there, holding it, oblivious to the tone, vaguely conscious of the recorded voice coming on some several seconds later asking if she required assistance; setting the phone back in place, slumping down in the chair again.

     She remembers it very well. Hadn’t she been the Hawk always? Hadn’t she always seen everything before anyone else? Hadn’t she been watching that very morning, eleven years ago? Hadn’t she watched the child run up that very hill, into that very park? Hadn’t she stood there, wondering why the child never returned? Hadn’t she asked herself if she shouldn’t go and check, herself? And hadn’t she stood exactly still, at her window, only watching? Watching until somebody else ran up and into the park? Until that same person ran back out and then more people came, and then Mr. Edison who hadn’t left yet come running across the street, almost getting hit by a car whose driver was also too busy watching? And hadn’t she fallen to her knees, stricken, faint, when Mr. Edison reappeared, carrying that still body in his arms, the child dripping wet, pale, lifeless?

     It was a year later, perhaps to the day, that Mr. Edison left; nobody has seen him since, and some say that he sleeps now beside that poor child; but nobody is sure. Only Mrs. Edison. Poor Mrs. Edison, thinks the Hawk, she was probably visiting the child tonight, that’s why she wasn’t home.

     She half glanced at the phone, half-remembering that she was expecting his call. Without realizing what she was happening, she found herself standing by the phone now, disconnecting the wire and letting it fall; her hawk-like face falling into her hands, and the tears.

     ‘What kind of a name is Midas, anyway…?’

 

November 12, 2007. Mrs. Edison and her husband sleep fitfully on the sofa in the living room, the television on but muted, the sewing machine in the corner still but cluttered with mis-sewn or severed threads, botched patterns. A relic. A young girl sneaks down from her attic into her parent’s bedroom where her newborn baby brother sleeps. A mechanical hourglass marks the passage of time. It is a rare hour of quiet; the sand, however, is almost out.

     The boy makes no reaction as she sneaks into the room, tiptoes herself over to the cradle and stands over him looking down, hating him for taking their love away from her, hating him for being born. She thinks of all the hurtful things she could say, and being six years old they are fairly tame, but the feeling is pure and the same in spirit. She doesn’t know it yet, but tears are forming in her eyes, hot tears; her heart pounds, she leans over the sleeping boy’s face, inches away…

     Perhaps it is this closeness, or the pounding of her heart, but the baby boy opens his eyes, seeing her; she jerks away from him, as if struck. He smiles, probably thinking that an angry six year old with leaky eyes is a funny thing; and he emits a little warble, a coo. His hands, arms move stiffly, as if reaching up, but that can’t be possible yet for one so young. He is merely existing. No, not merely…he is a thief, also, stealing from her the attention, the love, that had always been saved just for her. The hugs, the kisses, the warmth. Was I really going to kiss him, just now?

     The boy’s body and his legs are wrapped snuggly in a blanket, the same blanket that she had watched mommy sewing while the baby was still just a thing, a round shape inside her, without a face to kiss, a body to hold. And the girl decides to steal something from him, too.

     Taking that blanket, she sneaks quietly out of the room--is out the door before he starts to cry. I hope you freeze to death forever, she thinks, hurtling across the street into the park, that place where no one goes but where they always used to play with her. Blinded now by the tears that she doesn’t even know she’s crying, the little girl keeps running, her white dress trailing behind her like the flag on a ship that waves goodbye as it disappears from sight.

     Some hours later, her body is pulled from the little pond and placed into the arms of her father; he covers her with kisses and with tears, just as she’d missed, but she doesn’t feel them now.

     Everybody leaves. The blanket, all sponged up with water, sits at the bottom of the pond. Nobody ever knowing it was there.

Author's Note

I know it's in need of editing. But I'm also in need of the motivation to do it, so here we are.