The clock, knife hands juddering, cut the meanest slivers of time. It minced the barking of dogs and the holy choir to the same pulpy noise-trash. As an ever peeled eye, it glared. Cold it was upon a cold wall all winter long. For the warmer seasons, it cared not a jot. To the beauty of flowers was blind. To the chirping of baby birds it was deaf. Alas, it wasn’t mute and its bland ticking tocks came with a regimented abruptness. It was a beat never to bare the impertinence of sweet lyrics. Its ticks were its pennies and, as Scrooge, to cooly count them was its raison d’être.
Eyes open! Eyes wide! The clock hands leap as gayest spring lambs. The clock hands sun-sing amid this blessed morrow’s tide. Sound and sight marry as one, bolder in each declaration that true day hath begun. So rise up! Come hither! Grab bonnet and cap! Grab parchment and pen! Bring sweet maple sap! The cold night is banished. The long winter battle is won. A dawn of mirth and merriment announces that happiness hath come.
A clock of austere countenance snubs its nose at gravity, perching upon a crude nail as if it were a plinth of rock. In the dusty grim, behind curtains sewn shut, each second drips as miserly metered tears. Each ruthless clang-sob leads its silent apostle, only to self erase, to dissipate, to surrender to the next. Each ruthless clang-sob announces itself as the newest word for pain, the newest name of the newest newborn. This ever open eye blinded itself, witnessed not, spoke not, of what was plain to see. This eye, you see, was the faithful servant of the obscurantism that birthed it and hung it on the wall.
All twelve points of the clock were demarcated with alligator teeth. Even the trite ticks, the trite tocks, arrived as clouds of muffled edge, soon to dissipate into a formless fog of deep-set cold. Alba stared, her loathing escalating to a feverish peak. She traced its scaly-skin rim, its scaly skin face, its femur and tibia hands - if that’s what they were. It was a gruesome thing built to measure the era of monsters. Flammable, she thought, and her mind sought the location of a match, a lighter, and perchance an accelerator.
The clock, arms wide at ten and two, was the happiest of goalkeepers. It was the galant keeper of time, a defender of saunter, neither speeding nor slowing. Though some thought it nonchalant, even phlegmatic, it was the bringer of newborn nights at the seal of each day. It ensured that each star was cosy in a blanket of pure black. It watched with its ever open eye. Then, come the morrow, the ignition of dayshine, it kept its rhythm as steady as a heroic heart. Tickerty-tick. Tickerty-tick. Steady and true. Tickerty-tick. Tickerty-tick.
The clock of dustless shoestring hands ran infinity marathons with ease. The expanse before and the expanse behind, it covered in metronomic stride. “Twas not simply a simple time piece, humble though it was, yet a heartbeat for our home. Reliable. Steady. It was as earth meeting soles regardless of incline or weather, in the good times and the bad, in songs of heartfelt joy or tears, a companion it was through those prevailing years.
The carriage clock had no business there, ticking time off so indifferently, as if each second were a chore done.