Category Archives: Writing

L watched the clock. It was the decision-maker today. If three should be reached by the small hand, escape was possible. If not, the weather would decide. International time came with baggage. No one remembered but everyone could sense that there was meaning in the numbers that upended the current meaningless nonsense; a circle had been traded off for a zig-zag, lightning that might never strike. Seconds expanded and contracted by indecipherable will, a will not to power but to unpredictability. The loss of surprise could have been the end of days, but L’s ancestors had seen fit to resurrect it, using means that may not have been justified in the end. So L waited, a pawn in a new game, played by a chess master raised beyond dimensionality. History had forgotten that punching a clock had given way to ignoring time in favor of whims, just as whims had passed away to ignoring everything. Utility had been worshipped, but now utility was dead. Interest rates had been watched, but now money was dead. What L dreamed of, more often than anything else, was mutual commitment, the notion that a future of sacrifice could be opted into by multiple parties and trudged through, whether whim or time or the weather were in favor of the march. L wasn’t supposed to know this could even be possible, but someone had passed the history along, a memory that acted as a total belief system: if it could have been, it might be, so existence depends on it. L smelled the possibility of meaning, not in the sense of the words or the interpretation of the uncontrolled clock, but in terms of life itself. Could meaning exist without any context? L was grasping a dictionary that only had a single word in it. Could this become a meaning? Repetition might make it so: a thousand copies of the dictionary, whispered into the darkness. One minute to three. And suddenly it was four. L settled in, wondering if the wheel of time was flat, if there was a hole in the tube. More context was needed to make anything out of this, L was certain of it. But context was not forthcoming and the imagination could not concatenate empty space into a story. The horror of the blurry numbers was their facelessness, the lack of melody. Total darkness would have been easier to stand than the red lines’ formulations. Everything was a fragment, disconnected from origination and without enough substance to combine. The cave didn’t have any shadowy figures lit by nearby fire. If there were figures, they were silent and invisible. If there was a fire, it had gone out so many numbers before. Even the moral compass toward a story, with its glorious ending, had been wrested from L, probably generations ago. There was nothing to miss, nothing to expect, nothing to demand. Only the possibility that three might appear and something might change.