The Clock Shop

Phase six: Artificial individuality

it will be written again. Ticking. Ticking. Ticking. Oneiric dust sheet levering my lens, again, into these dyspeptic veins.

The clock shop is where I come in my dreams, and I have walked this path before.

Silence seduces the mould in the boneyard. The hands of the hanged can’t swing in this foetid brine. Legion of glass bellies and brass hearts which have abandoned bloodless faces.

Tracking this taunting ticking, cadaveric spasms in no-man’s land.

Some tabletop – rose-faced and squat as robins, stuck at one o’clock. Others have obliging curves sloping into gimcrack kissers – three thirty. Groggy numerals in need of repair, frizzy pediments and broken pendulums dead at four forty-five.

Slipping beneath the filial battlements, the birth canal, falling at the feet of the siren of the ticking.

She is a stranger, but I have been here already.

Behind the bevelled glass she is as hollow as a violin. The drips of light dribbling from a window behind are kind – outside, it is sunrise – orange dawn supping on the last lick of the moon. Her face reads six fifty-nine.

The mimetic surfaces resist my reflection. My alarm will go off at seven. All of this has been written before and
Emily Cornwall, 19, UK. Instagram: @emcee_writes.