he measured dawn in vertebrae

Once, a boy swallowed a clock because he thought time would digest more gently if it ticked inside him. The minutes bit at his ribs like starved dogs. At night, he could hear the hour hand dragging itself across his spine, inch by inch, a slow crucifixion of chronology.

He had been told once- by a woman with her eyes sewn shut with red thread- that the body was an hourglass, and the soul the sand. As appealing as that sounded, the hourglass was archaic. For a modern boy with many modern luxuries, a digital clock would have made the most sense; however, something about the idea of all those wires intercrossing with his veins made him sick. So he settled on the reliable old grandfather clock. A timeless yet functional piece of home decor.

Each morning, his breath came out in ticks, staccato and metronomic, like a symphony tuning in reverse. Children occasionally threw rocks to hear the gong of his heartbeat. And he walked- always east, always toward dawn- as if he might outpace the pendulum swinging in his throat.

His boots had worn down to the threads, frayed like cassette tape, and the earth beneath him clicked with each step, metronomic, patient, just as his body was. The sky had begun to wrinkle. Not dramatically, not with the bombast of apocalypse, but like old paper warping under a glass of spilled water. Clouds thinned to threads, strung slack across a paling dome, as though the heavens themselves were unraveling—first seam, then stitch, then sigh. Still, the sun rose. Still he ticked away.

The gluttonous dawn consumed the sky on the day he knew to be his last. The hourly chime that now rattled his ribs like a prison bell had become creaky. That day the landscape changed around him with the slow deliberation of a dream. Fields gave way to concrete, salt flats gave way to something that may have been a desert or may have been the inside of his own mouth. And always the pendulum swung in his throat, a second tongue, with each swing, it said now. As if time weren’t a river but a meat grinder. Each moment caught in the teeth, ground down into pulp, made indistinguishable from the last. And he could feel it- feel it- grinding just behind his breastbone, where his heart ticked, ticked, ticked. Ever a pilgrim of chronology, the boy continued eastward.

An operatic hush, swollen with expectancy, draped over the landscape. That is how the boy knew that this was it. Honestly, it was getting humiliating. The whole body-clock arrangement had felt kinda mystical at first- tragic, mysterious. But now? Now it was just him, dragging a carcass full of clock guts through a dying landscape while the universe watched. He liked to think that he could understand the universe in a way others couldn't. He measured it in his heart, with each beat, with each tick, he could know that something was happening. Something changed, even if he had to give said change its own meaning.

That day, the day he knew to be his last, low fog braided around his ankles, lukewarm and sour, like breath exhaled through teeth too old to bite. There were no people, but that didn’t mean he was alone. The pendulum in his throat had started to skip. Not often. But enough. A hesitation between ticks, a missed heartbeat, a held breath. It gave him vertigo.

The boy could not feel the fog. He could not feel the ground against his now bare feet- for his shoes had long since worn away- what he could feel was his exhaustion. He could feel himself nailed to a cross of his own creation. Only it wasn't his creation. His error? Time wore shoes now. Time had legs, and they ached with memory. The boy had no legs nor shoes. His body had gone obsolete, more relic than residence, more parable than person. He moved not with steps but with memory, dragged forward by the inertia of intention.

An unshod time did not feel but understood the dwindling strength of the boy. Beneath his skin, the gears were rusting. The clock had long since digested and springs uncoiled to replace intestines.

The woman with the thread-sewn eyes must've been right. He had done something wrong. If he hadn't, he wouldn't be in such pain. The pain was not cinematic, not articulate, not measured. Not operatic or symmetrical. It was the kind of pain that makes metaphors embarrassing. The kind of pain that turns symbolism into spam mail. He had become grotesquely literal. A boy with a clock inside him.

As Atlas succumbed to the weight of the sky and chicken little cried wolf, the boy's face did not change, but the idea of his face softened, blurred, receded. There wasn’t a body left, only architecture: bone scaffolding where time had hung its coat. The shape of him still cast a shadow, though it no longer pointed east.

Spasms, not ticks, measured the jarred reality. Birds stopped singing and even the air felt like it was exhaling in lowercase. Not silence, just a kind of ambient regret.

The springs fell from the boy’s mouth—a vomit of words he’d never spoken, folding like a paper crane mid-plummet—while his body went limp and useless, as wet clothes do in a sink. The gears inside him had ground down to filings. The gong of his chest had fallen silent. No crescendo, no finale, just a soft, pathetic decrescendo, like a child falling asleep mid-tantrum. His breath stuttered. His shadow twitched. And the pendulum in his throat- god, it finally stopped. Where memories go when they can’t be metabolized.

And when the ticking ceased- not stopped, but ceased, like a story rerouted mid-sentence by a stammering god- he became not boy, not clock, not corpse, but a complicated metaphor for what it means to measure your life in borrowed verbs, now retired into the archival hush of once.