Most garbage cans hold a laptop perfectly. The first thing I do when I get home is slap my Macbook into the trash like a used textbook. I slide off my scarf, undo my tie and set a pot of coffee to brew. For all of its bells and whistles, the simplest thing about my computer meant it had to go. The peck of numbers in the right hand corner, the empire of date and time. As I hang my jacket on a kitchen chair, I’m not surprised to find it damp, from a funeral full of tears. I carefully undo my wristwatch, and toss it into the sink, where it tumbles down the garbage disposal.
As I flip my phone out of my pocket, a prayer card flutters to the floor. It lands with the deceased’s picture face down, and I can’t bear to pick it up. She never said a silly little prayer in her life, anyway. The digital clock on my cellphone strike me like an iron fist to the ribs, and I slide into a chair, wheezing from the blow. I turn my phone off, but that’s not good enough, so I whack it against the side of the table and the screen cracks and the case bends. I toss it into the trashcan, where it clicks against the laptop—two peas in a pod, a pod that will soon be between the remorselessly grinding teeth of the trash compactor at the dump.
With my strength returning, I kick off my fancy, blister causing shoes. The timer on the stove catches my eye. It’s one minute slower than the one flashing across the microwave. It’s the middle of the afternoon, and the neighborhood is quiet, vacant. The ticking from the clock on the wall is the marching boots of an army vast and powerful but not, I believe, entirely undefeatable. The distant boom from the Grandfather clock in the living room is a cataclysm I aim to stop.
When waging a war, you need firepower. My garage is as good a provider as the local gun shop (aka Walmart.) In my socks, I slide across the floor and enter a cavern of vast tools that are all multi-purpose, from the littlest wrench to the jagged hacksaw. I go with the hammer. It’s small, compared to a softball bat, which makes it a more intimate weapon, which is fitting, because this is personal.
The clock on the stove puts up a fight. I miss with the hammer too many times and the vibrations threaten to rattle my elbow joints and shoulder blades to pieces, but I persevere. I hit that clock until the glass finally shatters and those green lights and all of their ceaseless lies are quelled. The microwave is next, where it sits on the shelf, cowering above the fridge. A microwave’s got nothing on the stove, and it knows this. I almost feel bad, but when I see a digital orange minute pass before my eyes, I feel nothing.
When I re-enter the living room, minding the fragments of glass and plastic, I flip the hammer to its hooked side, wielding it like a reaper’s scythe. The grandfather clock is a tower, a totem to what everybody claims is unstoppable. Time, oh you motherfucker. I will gut you.
I remember my grandpa, who is also gone, and the mallet he had in his garage that I used to take out into the yard when I would visit him and play as a child. I once banged it on a piece of metal and it flew back and whacked me in the face so suddenly that I laughed, till blood started dripping from my nose that soon became intermixed with tears. I remember playing with the hammer a few months later, because I had forgotten, somehow, the pain of crushing my nose. You forget pain, that’s the first thing. The problem is, you forget the point of the pain, too.
It’s not going to go down easy, so I start by pulling open the little glass door to those swinging metal pendulums and I stop them, by poking and holding them with my finger. Just like that, victory is near. My finger becomes a fist and with a good grunt of fury, I tear the golden pendulum free and toss it aside. I wrap my arms around the smooth, polished wood, and I hug the great timekeeper to the floor, letting the clock finish its drop once I’m sure it won’t crush my toes. Then comes the sick, dirty business every good conqueror knows they’ve gotta do. I clamber on top of that old totem to time that will cry no more, and I go to work with sharp side of that hammer. I go to work on that face first, plucking away those jagged arrows and flicking them away, like ants. I then re-arrange all of those numbers that are supposed to mean something, that even the calendar tries to emulate. Speaking of which…
I head into the kitchen, step on a piece of metal that lodges into my big toe (which immediately starts to bleed) and as I let out a chorus of curses to numb the pain. I still manage pull the kitten calendar from the wall and one by one I rip free the monthly themed pictures of poor distressed felines that she, my she, used to adore. I toss the cat pictures onto the table and then turn to shreds the charts and graphs of the days and weeks that try their best to be a cage.
I return to the grandfather clock, bleeding and full of a bottomless fury I wish I could release by breathing, screaming fire all over the toppled but still somehow ticking form before me. I notice that I’ve forgotten the clock on the kitchen wall. Oh, that bastard. From the living room I angle my hammer and let it fly loose. It twirls through the air and for a moment I think I’ve missed but, success, it hits the edge of the wall clock as that perfect circle that wants to be as important as the great sun in the sky falls. Good enough for now. I look down upon what’s left of the grandfather clock and it still has an aura of superiority to it. I think I’ll go get that aluminum softball bat after all.
When it’s finished and my enemies have been bashed and broken, I collapse, and think of the day I met her, and the food we ate and the songs we heard. There were all those smiles we shared, I’d like to remember each and every one of them. That day becomes now. There is a way to defeat the ticking of the clock. Time can be stopped. As I sit on my couch, among the destruction, I wonder if maybe it already has.
Nick Manzolillo is a content operations specialist for the news app, TopBuzz, and recently received his MFA in Creative and Professional Writing from Western Connecticut State University. His writing has appeared in over thirty publications including Thuglit: Last Writes, Monday’s Are Murder, Lovecraftiana and the Tales To Terrify podcast. He lives in Manhattan, with his girlfriend.
–Foreground Art by Claudio Parentela
–Background Art by Thomas H
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