This Time, Forever
Time is funny, the way it slips past when you’re not watching.
“Look at me,” Ell rasps. The air around her is sour, like turned milk. Thick enough to coat my tongue.
I bite my lip. Wince as the dry skin cracks. I want to look at her – I want to – but the moment my eyes leave the seconds hand of the clock on the wall, I know I’ll lose her. Every ounce of me is focused on that clock hand, on keeping it still. Time will not take Ell from me.
Not again.
“Look at me, Lexi, look at me,” she repeats, and almost, almost my eyes peel away.
In that half glance, the seconds hand slips forward an extra breath.
“No,” I say. “I won’t. If I do –”
“We all have to die sometime.” Her hand slides over mine. Wet. Slimy. “You can’t keep taking that away from me.”
I suppress a shudder, but my eyes remain glued to the clock. To the tick of time. Slow and methodical. Not racing like my heart. Not unraveling in a tidal rush like the rest of the world.
Ell doesn’t understand. How could she?
Outside the apartment a siren wails, and for the briefest moment my attention darts toward the window, toward the black-out drapes.
It’s enough.
Ell gurgles something, her words lost in a wet bubbling, and by the time I jerk my gaze back to the clock, it claims an hour has passed and again – again – Ell is gone.
* * *
I should never have kept the box.
“Hey,” Ell says, swiping the black lacquered box from the pile of junk on the kitchen bar and shaking it against her ear. Its contents swish dryly. “What’s this?”
I snatch it back. “Nothing. Just a…a thing from my grandmother.”
Even before my grandmother died last month, my apartment was a wreck. Like it plowed through a junkyard, dragging the whole mess behind it before cramming itself back atop the three-story complex I call home. Now there is just that much more junk, all half unpacked and shoved into every space available.
Ell stares at the box, eyes glittering like a crow’s. “Well?”
“Well what?”
“Well, what’s in it?”
I curl the box against my stomach. “I told you, nothing. It’s just a box.”
She doesn’t believe me, but after a few moments she gives in, flumphs irreverently onto the stack of papers on the couch, and pulls out her phone. “So,” she says, “what’ll it be for dinner tonight? Pizza? Thai?”
I set the box back on the counter. My fingers tremble against its cool surface. “How about we go out tonight?”
Ell’s nose wrinkles. “We went out last night. And the night before.”
“I know.” I cross my arms. Uncross them. “I just…I just don’t want to be home right now. Not with all this” – I gesture at the chaos filling the space, a dead woman’s life splayed out for display – “this.”
“Oh,” she says. Her breathing slows. “Of course. We’ll go out, however many times you need.”
As she smiles, my fingers clutch harder at the box.
But then she pushes off the couch and swoops past me, grabbing her keys off the counter and planting a kiss on my cheek as she blows past. The door swings open and she leans against the jamb.
“You coming?”
I peel my fingers from the box. “Yeah.”
Half an hour later, we’re downing street tacos by the half dozen at a busy intersection while the wind freezes our noses solid.
The box, I’m certain by this point, is long forgotten.
* * *
I love Ell. I do.
My mother never understood. Said it was unnatural. An abomination, even. She said a lot of things before I left. Probably even more after.
But my grandmother understood, or at least didn’t complain. Which I guess is why she left me the box.
I really wish she hadn’t.
* * *
The cancer shouldn’t have happened. Not to Ell. I can think of half a dozen people more deserving.
“Come on, Ell,” I say as she stumbles up the breezeway stairwell beside me. “You can do it.”
“I can’t,” she says. Her breath rasps, dry and papery thin. Stolen by the endless rounds of chemo. “I need to rest a moment.”
“But we’re almost there. Just a few more steps.”
It doesn’t matter what I say, though. Her legs crumple beneath her, and I help settle her atop a concrete step before she tumbles down.
She leans back against the stairs, face inches from a discarded cigarette. The parking lot is half empty, a wrought iron fence separating the complex from the strip mall next door. Vehicles honk and squeal as they vie for position at the nearby intersection, and two women scream at each other on the sidewalk.
We sit. Watch the world speed past while clinging desperately to each other and trying not to drown.
Finally, Ell speaks. “I think I’m done,” she says, and I know she’s not talking about this brief respite.
I told myself I wouldn’t cry when she finally said the words. I promised myself.
But that’s the problem with promises: they’re easier to make than to keep.
* * *
I’m nine when I first see the black lacquered box.
My mother’s left me at my grandmother’s again, like a spare puzzle piece she doesn’t know what to do with. Grandmother’s house is a two-bedroom 1950s cottage on what used to be the outskirts of town. The town, of course, eventually caught up, and what was once a sleepy street grew busy with impatient drivers blasting past and the sounds of the nearby interstate. Still, it feels perfect to me. Hidden.
Grandmother collects containers – old glass bottles of every shape and color, tiny wicker baskets crammed with even tinier wicker baskets…and boxes. So many boxes. I spend hours unearthing strange box after strange box from beneath piles of linens untouched for decades or stacks of empty photo frames. Wooden boxes with variegated bands, small hinged tins still dusted with powder, and more oriental-styled jewelry boxes than any one person could possibly use. Nestled like little secrets just waiting for me to discover them.
Even so, I know the black lacquered box is different as soon as I touch it.
I find it in Grandmother’s bedroom wardrobe, buried under a pile of dead moths and a black derby hat. My skin itches as I brush the moths from its surface and wipe away the dust.
Just as my fingers close around it, though, my grandmother’s stern voice explodes behind me.
“Alexandra Lee Jenkins, you get your hands off of that!”
I startle atop my wobbly pile of cardboard boxes and tumble to the floor onto a mess of old papers.
Grandmother scoops me up and settles me on my feet, staring me straight in the eyes the entire time. “Alexandra,” she says, “I don’t want to find you in this wardrobe again, you hear?”
The tears well up behind my eyes, but crying is for kids and I’m trying so hard to not be a kid anymore.
She shakes me hard enough my knees knock together. “Do you hear?”
“Yes ma’am,” I say, snot beginning to dribble out my nose. I sniffle, still vainly fighting back the tears.
But even as I say them, I know the words are a lie. In the short time touching it, the box has wormed its way into me, much like a tick. My grandmother may have pinched out the body with her quick actions, but the head is still there, buried beneath my skin.
Waiting. Watching.
And nothing short of death will pluck it free again.
* * *
Death.
Such a plain word for so ugly an event.
My grandmother died, a bullet through her mouth and the rest of her painted across the teal bathroom tiles. No note, no warning. Nothing.
Ell, snot and foam dribbling from her mouth, a whimper clinging desperately to her lips, is just as inconsiderate.
“At least I left a note,” she gurgles the first time I shape her back into the world.
At that, I slap her. Wet Ell-bits go flying. Burrow into the brown carpet. Slither across the kitchen linoleum like fat slugs.
“It’s not enough,” I say, and unable to stand looking at her anymore, quickly lose her to the flush of time.
Next time, I’ll be better prepared.
Next time.
* * *
Thirteen petals.
Black, veined in deepest violet. Wrinkled, brittle. Dry.
They smell like waking up only to discover you’ve left something behind.
That’s what was in the box when I started.
Now there are only three.
* * *
My grandmother is sunk into her chair, the underskirts of her eyes puffy and gray. She’s old, older than I remember.
“Nana?” I tread carefully as I approach. She’s tired, my grandmother, moreso every time I see her.
Not that I see her often anymore. I’ve met a new girl, Ellen. Well, Ell, actually. She hates the name Ellen. Says it reminds her of prim dresses and formal dinner parties where everyone has to ask for permission to sit or to stand or just to scratch their nose.
My grandmother’s eyelids flutter groggily and with difficulty peel open. “Alexandra? Is that you?”
She doesn’t see so well anymore. Or walk. Or anything, really.
“You okay, Nana?”
Her eyes sink shut again. “Wilford, dear,” she mumbles, “get the door will you? I think the postman’s come.”
With a sigh, I settle in at her feet and snuggle against her legs like I’m nine again.
But it’s not the same. Not anymore.
When she begins to snore, I slip away to her bedroom. I try on old jewelry for a while, clunky and tarnished, but it only delays the inevitable. Eventually, I find myself at the wardrobe.
The black lacquered box is where it always is.
Carefully, I slip it from its shelf, huddle atop a giant oaken chest at the foot of the bed, and pry open the lid. The first whiff is just as I remember. My skull lightens, and it feels like time is stretching in every direction at once. A minute passes, an hour – or maybe only a single breath – and then the scent dissipates, once more replaced by that musty moldy smell that permeates the house.
I reach into the box. Hand trembling. Brush my fingers ever so lightly against one of the petals.
It’s like velveteen. Like moss.
The phone rings, an old handset still perched on the kitchen wall. I hear my grandmother startle awake in the other room and shuffle her way toward the belligerently ringing phone.
By the time she answers it, it’s stopped ringing.
“Hey, Nana,” I say, emerging from her bedroom with a dusty quilt. “I just came by to see how you were doing. You were asleep when I came in, though, so I went to grab something to cover you up.”
She stares at me, confused a moment. Then her eyes brighten and she smiles. “Oh, Maria, I wasn’t expecting you by today! Wilford will be so pleased you’ve come to visit.”
My chest stretches tight, heaves like a ship at sea.
It takes ten minutes to extricate myself, ten agonizingly long minutes that seem to spread into hours. But eventually my grandmother falls asleep again, and I slip quietly away, locking the door behind me.
* * *
The door is deadbolted.
More to keep things out, though, than to keep things in.
“Why?” I ask, a wary distance from Ell. I haven’t got her hands down quite right yet, but she’s surprised me before with less.
Ell struggles to heave herself upward, but without a solid bone structure to support her, she slumps back to the carpet in a pile. I’ve set the clock beside her this time so I can watch both her and it.
“I told you,” she gurgles. Saliva dribbles down her chin. “It hurt too much. I was done with it. With all the pain. With the living. The box just made that clearer.”
Beside her, the clock’s hands press forward. They’re like needles in my skull, drilling their way slowly out. The black lacquered box sits beside me, lid hinged open.
Two petals remain.
“Well,” I say, squinting against the press of time, trying to hold those hands in place just a few seconds longer, “maybe I wasn’t done. Maybe I still needed you.”
Ell tries to shrug. Ripples instead. “I’m sorry.”
It’s too much. The clock’s hands snap in half against the pressure, and their stubs spring into motion even as the ends fall to the towels I’ve set below Ell.
By the time I clench my teeth, Ell is gone and only the steaming flesh-stained towels remain.
I toss the entire mess into a trash bag and haul it to the dumpster before it can stink up the place.
* * *
I can’t get back Grandmother’s face. I saw the pictures after her death, read the reports. When I sleep, she haunts me with that meaty pit, with those mangled lips.
The coroner said she actually survived the initial shot.
I think on it too much, on that final flinch. Of the blood throbbing free, pooling around her feet. Of the billions upon billions of nerves screaming for release.
When I bring her back – the only time I bring her back – they’re still screaming.
Thankfully, her time slips by fast.
* * *
“Why would you keep this from me?” Ell’s fist is clenched. The black lacquered box’s contents are spilled atop the bedsheets. “This is…fantastic. It’s the best I’ve felt in months!”
Anger wells up inside of me. The box isn’t for Ell. It’s my secret. My escape.
I reach for the box, but she blocks the way.
Any other day, and she’d be easy to topple over. She’s so fragile now. So brittle.
“Close it back,” I say.
She stares at me like I’m insane.
“Close it back,” I repeat, hating the low whine lingering in the request, “or it won’t work anymore.”
She considers. Already, its effects are wearing off, though, her slow-time draining away, the crush of her body pressing into the void. She steps aside. Stumbles.
I catch her before she falls completely. Help her to the floor.
“What are they?” she whispers as I collect the petals back into their box, counting carefully to ensure all twelve are still there.
“Time everlasting,” I say, though that isn’t the whole truth. Or likely even half of it.
It’s more than I got from my grandmother, though.
It’s not enough.
* * *
The last time I see my grandmother alive, she’s on her knees atop the dingy kitchen linoleum, hunched like some mad beast. Beside her, a plastic bag of potpourri spills its contents. With one hand she clutches a brass pocket watch. With the other, she digs out a petal of deepest ruby red, so red it’s almost black, and wads it into her mouth.
“Nana?”
She startles, looks at me with frightened eyes. “Alexandra? Alexandra, is that you?”
The wet petal dribbles from her lip.
I kneel beside her. Wrap my arms around her frail frame.
“I just wanted Wilford back,” she says. She quivers in my arms. “Why won’t he come back?”
It’s only then I notice the pile of loose hairs and fingernail clippings at her knees, topped with saliva-soaked petal after saliva-soaked petal.
Black hairs, straight. Not my grandmother’s frazzled gray.
“Just one more time,” my grandmother whispers as she clings to me. “Just one more time before I forget how.”
I put her to bed, clean up the mess.
But I can’t stop thinking about the potpourri petals.
So dark.
So black.
So wet.
* * *
“How many?” The right side of Ell’s face droops as she speaks, but the left side is solid. It’s my best shaping yet. She even has a functioning hand, though the bones are more like cartilage and her grip is weak.
Still, I clasp that hand. “One. Just one.”
I haven’t cried since the fourth. I’m not going to cry now.
“Good,” she gurgles, wet petal barely clinging to her cheek. “Soon you can move on.”
I glance away, losing a few seconds. I’ve surrounded her with analog clocks. Clocks in every corner, clocks in every niche. Everywhere I look, there is a clock. Flimsy hands bat away at time. And yet it’s not enough. It’s never enough.
I squeeze her putty fingers. “I’ll never move on.”
“Hush.” Her throat wheezes, and for a moment, the sound of it reminds me of my grandmother, air swooshing free.
“I mean it,” I say. “I’m going to join you soon. I just wanted to let you know that.”
In the ensuing silence, one of the clocks manages to press time forward another second.
I slide my gaze back to Ell. Lose another second in the exchange. “Well? Aren’t you going to try to stop me?”
The right side of her face droops further. “I was broken, Lexi. And so tired. It was the only way.”
Gently, I wipe a bit of foam from her lips. “Yeah, well, maybe I’m tired too, now. Did you ever think of that?”
She doesn’t answer, and eventually, our time runs out.
Again.
* * *
I sniff deeply, desperate to capture every last trace of scent remaining in the box. One petal remains. One more summoning, and then I’ll never see Ell again.
I should stop. I know I should stop.
But I won’t.
Because I have to see Ell one more time. I have to.
No matter how much it hurts.
* * *
The funny thing about time is that it’s neither as fast nor as slow as you think. And no matter how hard you watch it, it always has its way with you in the end.
That’s what I wrote in my note, at least. My final words of wisdom, written atop a stained sheet of paper in two colors of ink only because my first pen ran out. I lay on a tatty beach towel atop the brown carpet, the room ticking around me. Mirrors line every space that isn’t filled with clocks. I’m trapped in a box filled with nothing but time and space. A hundred Lexis, and soon a hundred Ells.
In my right hand, a few final pieces of Ell’s hair, ripped out of her hairbrush. In my left, the last petal.
The black lacquered box lays discarded beside me, useless now. Empty.
Slowly, gently, I press the petal atop my tongue. Crush it against the roof of my mouth. I follow it with the hairs, but instead of spitting them to the floor like all the previous, I gag the entire mess down.
“Come on back,” I say as my stomach begins to rumble. I picture her beginning to unfold inside me. A piece of me now in a way she never has been before. “Come on back to me one last time, Ell. And this time, let’s make it last forever.”
