CW 8: Cuckoo

I wrote this today as part of my commitment to the Clarion West Write-a-thon. A dedication means that person sponsored it by donating to CW, and then provided me a writing prompt that sparked the piece. If you would like something written especially for you, please consider sponsoring me.

Here’s all the work of the 41 days. You’ll also find these pieces cross-posted at Sterling Editing as incentive for writers to practice their editing and story-building skills.

Enjoy.

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Cuckoo

for Marny Ashburne. Thank you for your support of my work and Clarion West.

“Is she aware?” Caroline said.

“Of course,” the Clockmaker said, quite dispassionately.

The pendulum swung steadily. A beautiful clock. Old. It might have been keeping time for centuries.

The minute hand clicked to 11:57.

“Is she suffering?”

The Clockmaker said, “It does not cause her physical pain to be small and wooden.”

Caroline thought of Grace. The lithe, restless body immobilized. Those clever fingers touching nothing. Unable to blink, unable to look away, unable to close her eyes to what had become of her.

“You haven’t answered the question,” Caroline said.

The Clockmaker looked at her for the first time as if she were perhaps not so tedious after all, perhaps even a tiny bit interesting. “Time is longer inside the clock; not in a physical sense, but a minute of despair is always longer, no? A minute of knowing oneself alone and lost. A minute of clutching hope, or losing it. And another, and another. Tick tick tick. Then the hour approaches, the mechanism gathers itself, the doors burst open and she is out…”

Out in a dark, dusty storeroom of a shop closed for the holiday weekend. Out in a hallway outside a mudroom where no one paid attention because they were too busy coming and going. Out in the common room of a residential center where people watched from their wheelchairs or the greater prison of their minds. Out in a busy household with people who did not wind the clock for days, for vacation, forever.

The pendulum swung steadily. 11:58.

“So she suffers,” Caroline said.

“Of course,” the Clockmaker said, with a face no longer impassive; underneath the skin, satisfaction moved slowly, like slugs in soil.

Caroline nodded.

“And now you must choose,” the Clockmaker said. “Take her place, and spend your life knowing she walks free. Or walk away yourself, and imagine forever her minutes, her hours, her years here in the clock.” The Clockmaker watched Caroline’s face with great interest now. “This is always such a rich moment,” the Maker said. “It is one thing to give your death for someone. But will you give your life?”

The pendulum swung steadily. 11:59.

“Choose,” the Maker said.

“Oh, go fuck yourself,” Caroline said, and shoved her fist right through the Maker’s face, through the wide O of surprise and what might even perhaps have been delight, right through to the doors of the cuckoo clock as they burst open and Grace came out on the spring, arms reaching, and Caroline opened her hand…

What happened then?

Does it matter?