of the winter garden they would know nothing

Wednesday, August 15, 2007

The Last Clock On Earth

He wakes up to the last cheap Casio chime of 12 o'clock as its echo worms out from the great crumbling tower through the streets of the abandoned city. He has forgotten where he is and slowly remembers. There is nothing else but the knowledge that he is here, the random name of where he is, the vague flickerings of somewhere else shorting out into the old dark. The rain is falling or is it the wind? Gusts of either or both pelt the long grey walls and windows around him. His eyes are not yet open, but the smell of the world makes little flashes of color against the back of his eye lids. It is as if the universe were pulsing into to life from inside him out infinitely, out into the vastness where someone else is waiting, waiting in the same dawn-less empty... counting the pelts of the same rain or wind, the chimes of the digital clock tower that lives forever at the end of the world, counting and waiting, waiting for him. Slowly he opens his eyes. It is all still there, the grey moonless slate stark city, the broken windows and screaming quiet, the rain and the wind both this morning. If it can be called a morning. And far off a single blinking light at the edge of the eternal metropolis, a firefly calling to its mate, calling to him... waiting. So... you're up early. The blinking stops. Shit, he thinks rising to his feet and killing the lantern. The universe is expanding again, warm bread in a closed oven. And inside it there a breathing list, the todo's of extinguished vacant planets, within the vastness there is work.