If Everyone Was Listening

Time hung limply on the clocks hands; the wrists of which were broken and mangled. She sat in the living room, her fish eyes grasping no more than the lights of the bow was flashed and spoke and coaxed her into a half-remembered lullaby. Her hands held a glass of snow - the snow of man, snow which falls on the heart and mind and pulls you into a blissful stupor.

How much she wished she didn't remember.

Sleep too, changed. Finding solace in sleep was a luxury reserved for the forgetful. Now it sharpened its teeth on her smile and made her remember. It fed off of the pain, it grew with her hatred. The more she stayed awake, the more it crept into the land of the living. There is no haven for those who wish to forget.

She awoke; moved on She got ready and walked three blocks down to the bus stop. There she stood, shoulders crumpled, knees crumpled, heart crumpled. She stood, shifting her weight from side to side. A small child with his mother stood not far off, his small black eyes staring relentlessly at the woman. A minute passed the ten, then an hour. Finally a bus - new and red - drove up and stopped. The mother and her child got in. Still the woman waited.

One hour. Two hours. Three hours.

The sun was now at its blissful peak, rays of sun playing a sonata to all that would listen. The woman got up, and walked back to the apartment, back to the room where the television was still shouting out its usual juxtaposition of nonsense. She turned it off, picked up the glass off of the floor, hid the crystal bottle full of snow, and turned to the table. There, a spread of papers with a singular pen lay. If you took a glance, you might notice that the writing the pages do contain is sparse, and in short bursts, like a fragment that you might have heard while walking through a room with the radio on. She picks them up, one by one, and stacks them into the corner of the desk. On a clean sheet of paper, she wrote: bus didn't come.

The woman stared at the page, stared at her hands. Stacked the page in between the one which read morning is kind at first and he didn't come home today. She got into bed, fully clothed, and looked up at the ceiling. It too contained a sort of static reminiscent of a television screen. Snow fell from the ceiling, and onto the mind of the woman. Sleep came, and with it the laughter of her memories.

She was standing at a bus stop. With her stood Christopher, sucking on a candy stick. They both had been much younger at the time, she about five and him about seven. They had been given change to go to the store for bus tickets and a few sticks of candy. She remembers how sticky the ticket had gotten from her fingers. The sun had been blessing them with a heat only remembered in that summer.

Now it is fall, a few years later. Christopher no longer held candy between his lips; instead, cigarettes adorned him with their grey lace trailing out of the tips. She remembered him the best like this, his floppy brown hair and leather jackets and halfhearted smile. She remembered how he came and went with his cloud of haze, which only enhances the mystery of that smile.

She woke up vividly, sweat drenched the sheets and her clothes. She got up, ran to the living room, and grabbed the bottle of snow with rain on her face. Drank one glass, then another, hoping the snow would cool the heart. But the rain kept on falling. Hacking sobs of rain, which melted the snow. Rain which burned through all the snow and came to the earth.

And in the earth a cigarette butt still smoldered, grey smoke encircling it like lace from a half-forgotten dream.