Peculiar Girl & Tick-Tock Clicking

Peculiar Girl and Tick Tock Clicking

Click, click.

Stay taps her finger. Click, on the metal sink as she stares out the wood bordered window of the kitchen, her eyes multiplied and gleaming in the glass crane on the sill.

Click, on the claw foot tub, water gone cold, toes pruney.

Click, click.

The sound of her heart, locked up behind tall, icy walls of skin and bone. Click, click, her heart ticks on. No thump or bump, pound or beat. Click, click, like a clock, second hand itching toward endless minutes, caged behind arctic glass, marking down numbers and moments.

What did Stay’s heart click down to? What waited for her at the end of her tick tock heart?

No more ticking, clicking or tocking, Stay thought. She knows what this is about. She knows what has come to haunt her.

Stay, alone, never experienced loneliness. With the click, tick, taping of her finger echoing through the empty home, loneliness began to echo in her tick-tock heart, creaking and cracking through frosty ice.

How? How could this be? Her friends dance in porcupine bones and swim in paper cranes. Her love and life live in collecting leaves and bones and deceased bugs hiding under brown leaves. No room for loneliness, no space to give.

Yet now she understood, loneliness ticked in her with every tock, tapped on every surface, scratching the blue flowers from her delicate finger. A finger not hers. A replacement, cold and aching, without true sense of feeling. Stay felt like the finger, in her home, in the world. Not truly a part, barely connected, sticking out. Cold, as the blood of life did not beat to her. Breath made no difference. All she had was click, click.

Alone, a loner, all one. Stay is one. Perhaps she was just one even when her mother was around. One amongst a thousand paper cranes, one among her vials of rain, and snow creatures built in the winter. One, even when she knew she was not.

Is this growing up? Is this a passing, fleeting, tick tock moment? Perhaps tomorrow it will be gone. Minutes will have ticked and clicked it away, dissipating the loneliness, the oddness, the bloodless finger feeling.

Click, click.

For now it goes on. Second after second, her soul a mechanic meaning, her thoughts are gears and drives spinning for something, working to get somewhere. Click, click.