Ever Onward
There once was a man with a clock for a heart.
Every day for twenty years, at a quarter past twelve, he looked up to the wall where a picture stood, dust bound, clutched with mold, and slanted as he wound his heart.
Once vivid and beautiful, now tattered and threadbare.
A woman’s face with a name he couldn’t recall.
He continued to wind, even as the memories began to fade. At times, he would wind his heart with great earnest, other times, idly and with ire, but always a quarter past twelve, to the second.
One day he sat down to tea, one hand loudly tapping as the seconds chirped away, his thoughts somersaulting with them. His fingers of the other idly flickings pages of the open book that sat quietly in his lap.
“Why, Dare I ask, am I still winding you, you fickle thing?” The man asked.
“What is it you’ve brought me? Besides pain, and heartache”
There was no answer, no answer in twenty years.
“No words, no answers, only ticking and chirping.” He grunted, shifting restlessly in the worn leather.
Perhaps it’s time to let old hands rest, he thought to himself, closing the book in his lap.
“What would happen if I chose not to, just once?”
The time pushed closer to the mid-day hour with it, the ticking growing louder.
“Who would I be, if I did not wind you? Would I still be me; I wonder?”
“And who am I? Names and faces are forgotten, even moldy paintings can’t stir forgotten memories…”
“Am I still a man?”
Opening his shirt, gnarled, wrinkled fingers dug beneath soft skin into a thrumming metallic chamber, and pulled.
There, inside, silver and as pristine as the day it was built. A heart-shaped clock, with a keyhole just beneath its ticking face. He cupped it into a shaking palm, staring blankly at its face.
“Why?” He asked aloud
He had forgotten. Only faint echoes remained.
Remnants of children’s laughter, and ages since past.
Who was he, if not for the winding of his clockwork heart?
Ghosts he thought, echos gone by.
“You wind it for me” A voice, warm and soft, like a whisper, coming from the edges of his vision.
He looked up with a start to see the once dusty painting had righted itself, no longer trapped with mold. Her beautiful glowing features now flush with color like the day he painted it.
“Always for you..”
His once dull grey eyes now hummed with a brilliant hue of electric blue and renewed vigor.
Once more he began to wind his heart as he stared onward.
There once was a man with a clock for a heart.
“We wind the clock because each new day brings the promise of more than the day before. You should never wind for anyone but yourself. To stop winding is to give up the brighter tomorrow.” -M.S.
