Sling

I glanced at the clock, and it seemed to leer back to me in the still and quiet dark of my mother's kitchen. It was late, even for this sleepless house, and dawn would break in a few more pensive moments, break and seal away the smokey spell of cloves and cannabis, chicory coffee and expensive whiskey. My limbs were lead, my eyes and throat dry, my ears howled within the liminal silence.

It would not be the first of many mornings at that kitchen table, and I would not always be there alone - many times my mother would take my place in the paisley and peach room of quiet contemplations. Sometimes, rarely, we would share it, many wordless hours in this unspoken hall of ritual from long ago. The many bitter, weighty thoughts of my distant adolescence, and the worn echoes of her time with her first lost love, confined us to this place.

The arrival of the morning gazette, startling in its force upon the kitchen door, would rouse us to the comings and goings of our daylight hours, surprising but not unexpected. It would permit us to set aside our unforgiven griefs and our graspings, to set out upon the threshold of morning, only to end up at last at our lonely post; always straining to splinter the sinews of Why, always the passing of the moments marked only by the piercing glare of the stained clock as our wicked audience.

Yesterday, today, and tomorrow were bled together at the edges, buried hidden under the barely-there dust unending that gathered, a dust that over uncountable days began to pile on and on, gaining a palpable and undeniable menace. It would stretch and deform the presence of the hours, twisting and groaning against the steady mechanical rhythm of the kitchen timepiece. A feeble human device that scarcely kept such a yawning monster at bay.

It cried and wailed and slammed itself against the mortal edifice to the cadence of my pulse, and never to any success, but roared endlessly, the frightful sounds of impossible and immaterial struggle entombed within the soft and often monolithic drone of the compressor motor in the refrigerator. The imposed order of timekeeping and routines set by newspaper arrivals were only for those who were not paying attention - the force of the beast at the gates shook the walls of the kitchen, made my breath ragged.