It was a Sunday. The old florist reclined in his lounge chair, filling out the local newspaper’s crossword with a generously leaky fountain pen, its ink collecting at the edge of his palm. On the other side of the room, a grandfather clock ticked, and the radio sang a soft song of lost loves and loves lost. The old florist sipped his cold tea and ruffled his newspaper.
The clock began to chime. Five hours since breakfast, three hours since the paper arrived, an hour since noon. The melody rang out from the bells hanging in the grandfather clock’s gut. Ding dong. Dong ding. Ding dong dong ding. Now came the hammer-falls, the strikes of the big brass bell, the markers of the hour. Dong. One o’clock. Dong. Two o’clock? Dong dong dong…
Thirteen hammer-falls. Thirteen o’clock? The old florist scratched at his wiry gray hair, his crown of thorns. He got up to examine the clock. He wouldn’t have set it to military time—he loathed to be reminded of the war. On its face, he found a ‘13’ in place of the usual ‘1’. He plucked a bristly hair from behind his ear. He could’ve sworn that it was a ‘1’ before—the rest of the numbers continued as normal, from ‘2’ back to ‘12’ again, but here, in place of the ‘1’, somehow, was a ‘13’. Strange. He hadn’t noticed this quirk before, in all the years this clock stood guard in the corner. He must’ve never given it much thought. Shrugging off this defect in manufacture, he laid back down, took another sip of cold tea, and ruffled his newspaper.
Another hour passed. Chime. Dong. One. Dong. Two. Dong dong dong…
The old florist stood up and once again inspected the clock. The hour hand pointed to a ‘14’. Fourteen? Just a minute ago—well, an hour ago—it read ‘2’! He began to sweat. Was he reaching that age? Had he finally begun to lose his mind, as his father had? Would he too start hearing the shadows talk, carrying a knife, eating nothing but red-colored foods? The old florist paced around the room, biting his nails and picking out steel-wool hairs.
A knock at the door.
It was his neighbor, the sweet clerk. The old florist knew her for most of her life—he was working the deck of the USS Ticonderoga when she was born, and first learnt of her when he returned to their little cowtown, San Obispo, in a little nowhere pocket of the New Mexican desert. She was an orphan—her mother died of tuberculosis, her father a stielhandgranate. In those days, the years after he’d gotten back from the pacific, he’d often invite her and her grandparents over for dinner, and talk to her about school, or her favorite kind of dog, or how irritating she found it to brush her teeth. Now, she lived in Los Angeles, working behind a desk at some fancy record company, the name of which the old florist could never remember. They mostly saw each other at the town graveyard, the few times a year she came to visit home. The old florist smiled when he saw her at the other side of the doorframe. She scratched her neck.
The sweet clerk asked if he had the time. Her clocks were broken, and she was expecting a phone call—a quite important one. The old florist twirled a hair around his finger and scratched his neck. No, he did not have the time. His clocks had broken as well. They all read fourteen.
The sweet clerk made a face. They decided to head into town.
They climbed in his old, rusted pickup truck with the faulty suspension that made every patch of gravel a speedbump. Turning onto main street, they found people chattering outside the town hall. The young mayor—hardly eighteen, the preceding mayor’s firstborn—tried to calm the anxious, confused mob. The old florist and the sweet clerk joined the crowd, adding their voices to the chorus of concern.
The church bell began to chime. The crowd fell silent. The melody played, then the chimes. Dong. Dong. Dong. Three. Dong. Their stomachs dropped. Dong dong dong…
Fifteen dongs. A baby began to cry. The hour hand of the chapel’s clock pointed to a ‘15’. Observing the side of the building, the old florist noticed something else. He nudged the shoulder of the sweet clerk. The shadows. Look at the shadows.
The shadows were, ever so slightly, pointing south. The old florist and the sweet clerk shielded their eyes and peered at the sun. It was moving north.
At one, two, three in the afternoon, the Sun arcs across the western half of the sky. At thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, the Sun arcs northward, apparently. The rest of the town began to notice, one-by-one. The church bell rang again. Sixteen. Panic. Disquieted murmurs became cries and shouts. The old florist noticed that the young mayor had disappeared. A moment later, the mob turned to see him speeding away in his parents’ old, rusted pickup truck, following the only road that led out of town. A pause. Then, all at once, the rest of the town clambered to their vehicles, the sound of shutting doors ringing out through the bare streets like gunshots at the O.K. corral. A convoy of Oldmobiles, Fords, and Chevrolets clogged up the road’s single lane, as the group headed for anywhere that wasn’t there.
The old florist and the sweet clerk rode in silence. Every once in a while, the sweet clerk would mumble—something about missing a call, a shift, a plane. Las Cruces, the nearest bastion of civilization, was about an hour away. The dinky analog clock under the radio ticked over to seventeen. In the rearview mirrors, the two watched the corrugated-metal and slatted-wood roofs of their little village sink below the horizon as the caravan carved its way through the landscape of cacti and tumbleweeds.
It was a quarter past twenty o’clock when the old, rusted pickup truck at the front of the pack pulled over to the side of the road. The sun had stopped moving northward. Now, it spun in small, rapid circles low in the sky, making the shadows of the trucks dance in dizzying pirouettes. At eight o’clock, the sun sets. At twenty o’clock, the sun twirls, apparently. The rest of the trucks pulled over to line up behind the first. The young mayor stepped out.
Four hours, he cried. Four hours! Where in the hell is Las Cruces? Something just ain’t right, he said. No bluff! called out the man who wore an oversized stetson, the man who fashioned himself a cowboy from a century past. The town poured out of their pickups and reassembled their mob, tittering and tattering themselves to pieces, biting nails and tapping feet, praying and cursing, falling to their knees and kicking up crumbs of asphalt.
The sweet clerk tapped the old florist’s back. It was no use. They should head back.
After only twenty minutes of driving the way they came, the sweet clerk and the old florist started to make out the metal and wood roofs of their little village rising above the horizon. The old florist huffed. The sweet clerk chuckled. Of course this would be the case. Why not?
When they arrived in town, lining their old, rusted pickup trucks on the curb, the church tower was ringing out the hours. Twenty-one o’clock. Darkness swallowed the congregation. In a flash, the whirling sun was replaced by a pin-up moon, plastered on obsidian wallpaper. At twenty-one o’clock, the sun does not set: it expires. Apparently. Why not?
The mob reassembled. No one had the will to panic. Like soot from a burning candle, melancholy swirled through the air, with heads held low and sobs tucked behind elbows and shirt collars. The sweet clerk turned to the old florist. They should head back to their corner of the village, get some rest while there’s still darkness. Who knows how long it will last?
Once home, the old florist did not sleep. He couldn’t manage it. Instead, he studied the hour hand as it crept along its slow, marching path. Twenty-two o’clock. The moon grew three sizes, and changed from crescent to full. Twenty-three o’clock. It shrank to a pinprick, and the stars disappeared. He waited for what should have been twelve o’clock. At the critical moment, he blinked. Twenty-four o’clock. The moon throbbed like a beating heart. He went to bed. Eight hours later, he woke up to a yellow sky. The grandfather clock read thirty-three. He lugged the god-damned thing into the yard and smashed it to pieces.
Thirty-three o’clock became thirty-four o’clock, became fifty-nine o’clock, became one-hundred-and-ninety-six o’clock. The townsfolk, in all this time, hadn’t an inkling of hunger, nor thirst. At five-hundred-and-one o’clock, black crows erupted from the sun in the thousands of millions, swelling in the sky, smothering the town under a shiny charcoal cloak. This is around the time when the old florist took up whittling, and the sweet clerk first buried her nose in the books of her grandfather’s library. At five-thousand-and-one o’clock, the village smelt of burnt hair. At twenty-three-thousand-and-forty-nine o’clock, the sun bounced on the horizon like a rubber ball. The young mayor snatched it out of the sky. He hadn’t aged since the clocks kept going. No one had. At forty-five-thousand-one-hundred-and-ninety-eight o’clock, gilded zeppelins flew overhead, dropping paperback copies of The House at Pooh Corner.
The old florist whittled, and folded paper cranes, and learned to play trombone, and built a house of cards as tall as the local radio antenna. The sweet clerk read, and read, and read, pillaging books from the town library when those of her grandfather ran out, and sourcing more from all the other homesteads’ libraries in town once she ran out of those. The old florist saw her every so often. Not as much as he’d like. When he did, she was just as happy to see him. He’d show off his hobbies, and she’d listen, laugh, and nod. She never talked about her books—when he’d ask what they were about, she’d laugh it off. Oh. Well, you know. Just things.
Five-hundred-and-ten-thousand, three-hundred-and-eighty-two o’clock. The sky was multicolored, an aerial prism. The old florist got up, showered, shaved, and dressed. He planned to head into town, help out with the clay brick pyramid the young mayor suggested the village build in order to help pass the time. He got in his truck, and as he drove past the sweet clerk’s homestead, he saw her laying out on her lawn, basking atop the dried grass in opalescent light.
He pulled onto her lawn and parked next to her old, rusted pickup truck. The hour changed. The sky snapped back to blue, and wingless cormorants started burrowing out of the dirt. The old florist walked over to peer down at the sweet clerk, his head eclipsing her sun.
He sat on the grass next to her. He mumbled something, and she mumbled in response. Another hour. The old florist mumbled, the sweet clerk mumbled. The sun waltzed with the moon, beheld by a gallery of iridescent asteroids and gas giants; the second dance of a celestial wedding. One more hour. The dark side of the sun lit the two in shadow. They mumbled, and muttered, and chuckled, and laughed, and remembered. She’d run out of books to read. Now all she did was remember. Remember the quirks of the town’s history, like when the self-fashioned cowboy assembled a frantic search party for his identity-defining stetson hat. She remembered episodes from their personal histories too—like when she tore petals off one of the old florist’s chrysanthemums, burning his face red, or when the old florist helped her pick out flowers for her prom date, the bald pharmacist’s lousy boy, the no-good cad who dumped her the next day. One story they particularly enjoyed recounting was the time when the old florist gifted the sweet clerk an old rocking horse—an heirloom, once owned by the beautiful gardener—which the sweet clerk broke the next day. With a laugh, she asked why he ever tolerated her.
Five-hundred-ten-thousand-and-six o’clock. A white firmament hung above them. The old florist fell silent. Picking a stiff hair from his temple, he told her that he cared for her. As if she were his own. She said that she knew. Growing up, she wondered whether she was taking up too much of his energy, whether she was the reason he never had his own children. The old florist smiled. No, he said. The reason he never had kids was because the beautiful gardener—no, that’s not right. The reason he never had kids was because Mae—the beautiful, sweet, kind, ‘let’s-leave-the-Christmas-tree-up-til-March’, ‘my-favorite-flower-is-a-dandelion’, ‘we-should- take-that-little-girl-next-door-to-the-state-fair’ gardener—couldn’t. They tried—for a long time they tried—but no baby ever came. The old florist shrugged. Maybe it was his fault, some genetic defect he carried. Mae never wanted to blame him, though. That’s just how she was.
The two sat and reminisced until the sun became a square and their eyelids began to droop. The sweet clerk said something. Something about some of the books. Something about black holes, and the way space can stretch and time can slow, or maybe something about the Dharma, the Samaveda and the Atman, or Paradise Lost, or Carl Jung’s Red Book, or something else the old florist couldn’t wrap his head around. She said she was going to try to leave. Pile everything she could ever need in an old, rusted pickup truck, and go. If she drove long enough, fast enough, far enough, then maybe she could break free, get out, end the loop. Even if it took an eternity, she said it was worth a shot. There is more to this world than what lies in this little cowtown, this nowhere pocket of New Mexico. She had to see. She had to know.
The sweet clerk asked the old florist to join her. No harm, right? Even if they don’t make it, the town would be right behind them. They could always turn back. He was skeptical, but as the sweet clerk asked, the light glinted her eyes, and he knew she was brainy—brainier than him—so he said ok. He’d go with her. She smiled widely, her eyes shining like headlights. Great, fantastic! He should grab whatever he wants to bring along. They’ll leave after they next wake.
She pulled up to his homestead when the sun was playing poker with Orion’s belt. The old florist stepped out of his home meekly, carrying nothing but a small wooden rectangle and a bouquet of flowers. The sweet clerk beckoned him to the passenger seat of the old, rusted pickup truck with a swinging arm. He climbed in, staying quiet, while the sweet clerk explained her plan, what he should expect, how excited she was to finally talk about all the things she read. The old florist tapped his fingers on the wood. He said he changed his mind. He wasn’t going.
Her face dropped. She asked why. Why? No harm, remember? They could always go back if it didn’t work out! There’s so much out there! Why wouldn’t he go? Why would he make her go alone? She—he has to come, he has to be there for this, why can’t he just go with her?
She looked at him, ready to continue pleading, but upon seeing the old florist, she fell short of words. He was looking down at his lap, holding a picture—a picture from the end of the war. A picture of him and the beautiful gardener. A picture of Mae. The sweet clerk smiled to herself, then sighed. Its ok, she said. She understood.
Before the sweet clerk left, the old florist asked for a ride to another part of town. She obliged. When they arrived, the old florist tried to say that he would miss her, but she interrupted him. She said she was sorry for leaving him there—all that time she spent in California. She should have visited more. It was his turn to laugh. He told her he’d always been happy that she did well for herself. That she became more than what this little nowhere town wanted her to be, what it tried to make of her. And hell, Lord knows they’d spent plenty of time together—even if at that moment, the time felt brief. After all, it was only a few hundred thousand hours or so.
Clearing his throat and blinking the water from his eyes, the old florist went to exit the car. Before he reached the handle, the sweet clerk grabbed his arm and pulled him to her chest, burying her head in his collar. In each other’s arms, the hours ceased to pass. After this eternity, the old florist pulled away and rested a hand on her shoulder. He smiled, then wished her luck. She said she’d see him again. He told her he would love nothing more, but that the thought was selfish. He hoped she didn’t need to turn around. That she would never have to look back. With a final clutch of her palm, he left the old, rusted pickup truck, and waved her goodbye as she pulled back onto the road and drove towards the horizon, her truck’s tires kicking up dust and gravel.
Once she was out of sight, he turned to face an alley of marble, slate, and granite. Water was falling out of the ground and raining into the sky. With flowers in hand, he walked along the column and laid the bouquet at the foot of the only thing he couldn’t have brought along. He sat down and closed his eyes, in order to better read the only words he knew by heart.
MARGARET “MAE” ORBISON
BELOVED WIFE AND FRIEND
JULY 8th, 1891 — SEPTEMBER 23rd, 1955
“If you live forever, may I live forever minus one day.”