Photo by Reza Rostampisheh on Unsplash
by Jessica Klimesh
He breaks clocks, then fixes them so that time stops, except when, just for fun, he moves the minute hand forward or the hour hand back, or vice versa, plunging the two of us into the past or soaring us into the future, but he does it with such skill that the warp of time is almost indiscernible, and at the dawn of a new millennium, the sun a ring of gold, I say, half-joking, “Let’s get married.” He pauses as though he’s actually considering it, his fingers poised above a clock’s caliber, but then he says, “You know what would be fun?” And so we get stoned and drive around in his Fiero, then flit about, writing poetry and making love, and instead of breaking clocks, he breaks down boxes and tapes them back together again, and time passes, slowly at first, but then with sonic speed, so I try to slow it down by breaking clocks and fixing them, just like he used to do. Night after night, I tinker with their internal mechanisms, but I don’t have the proper training, so time spins out of my control, rogue, and I eventually discard the broken clocks by the dumpster out back, brush my hands off on my jeans, and hope that no one will notice. But one day he crashes his Fiero, and another day, he fixes a bottle for a baby we haven’t yet conceived, and another day, he leaves, tells me it’s over.
Now I paint portraits of historical figures not yet born, and if I listen hard enough, I can hear the waves hundreds of miles away, ebbing and flowing at haphazard intervals, spilling softly upon the shore—breaking.
Jessica Klimesh is a writer and editor whose creative work appears in a variety of literary journals. Learn more at jessicaklimesh.com.
