The clock she bought in Argentina can only count seconds, getting lost on minutes and buried under hours. Like all of its kind, it ticks out a steady rhythm, heard for the fifteen seconds as the time rounds a generic upper quarter of the clock.
Then silence for forty-five.
She’d bought it partially for its beauty and price, but moreso for the woman behind the counter who had laid out the wooden butterflies. Everything here had been hand carved, from the clockface’s hummingbird to other animalian intricacies. She needed decor for her future home, she’d thought.
Now, face laid on unvacuumed carpet, she listens and remembers.
Did you hold my hand back then? Or look into my eyes?
Ask how to spell my name? Or did I tell you?
Whisper my name? Or scream it in anger?
Listen to the stories I told? Or replace them with your own?
Does what really happened matter?
She hasn’t drunk water in days, a remnant of the days before she knew better. She’d overcome the dark days years ago, yet here she has found herself again. It’s not hard to see the cliff, the sands and the salt and the shields.
Yet this time, it’s simply her: Alone on the mountaintop without even the dragon to keep her company.
Cheek against carpet becomes cheek against stone, a hoodie a traveler’s cloak. Hadn’t she longed for adventure once? How much she’d have given for a roar in the distance, for the low beat of wings on the horizon.
Could she identify her enemy, she would never lack to lift high her salt-stained dagger and push it through the dragon’s heart.
Yet instead, she finds herself the evil, cradling herself into the corner of an empty cave…
Tossed up useless in the middle of her bedroom floor.
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