The Hour of Fickle Hope

There’s never enough time for things like meaningful embraces; the playful joining of nose tips, or the gentle tasting of toes and fingers on caring, inseparable lips. The fireplace crackles with a comforting warmth that blankets the room in safe and deep aromas. Despite these anchors, Lillian clutches the journal as if it were a street post, and that the hour creeping towards her is a storm, determined to steal her flesh. 

What is this draft? The windows are shut and locked. This is a surety that cannot be overstated. The doors, too, and even the cupboards, damn you. There is the cacophony of clicks of popping wood, and the ticks of the granddaddy clock that sits as a grumpy professor of time in her peripheral. It will cease its incessant morse in exactly twelve minutes, and only continue after the hour has passed. The Hour of Fickle Hope, she calls it, in which reality takes a backseat to the long forgotten, and the deeply unloved. 

She opens the journal, flips to the last entry. “My dear Lillian,” it starts. “This region is nothing but ice. It seeps into me, and fills me with a sense that the incomplete will just have to stay that way. I feel as though my heart has little left of deliberate beats, and that perhaps my soul has grown ill equipped to handle such laborious habitation. Please, I know you will absorb the sorrow,  as if a mother. I ask that you don’t. My knowledge of such things, as are so heavily discredited, tells me that I will reach you again. Wait, my love, for the hour after midnight, when the rest of existence slumbers. I will find you, as I once did, curled up in a chair by the fire, tea in hand, skin reflecting the dance of flames.”

Tea in hand, though undrank, cold now. Dark circles around blue eyes. It has been five years. He won’t recognize you, not anymore. You’ve starved yourself with the diet of an ascetic. Though, addicted to opium, alcoholic, wine fiend, and shriveled up. The true stripping away of imperfections, only to be replaced by those not bound naturally to the tendencies of her spirit…. 

Tick, tock, tick, the clock stops. The flames of the fire freeze in place, an orange-red still life set to the backdrop of old stone. Lillian gazes around for signs of movement, for distortions in this dimensional offset. Ultimately, in her five years of experience, these thirteenth hours are long. The ramblings of a composer, and so many pointless notes, played for the sake of (good God) atmosphere. Get to the point, she mutters. Has she become but a character in a novel of her own delusions? It cannot be, those are giant spiders crawling along the walls. They have the faces of psychologists, always judging. “And if I were but a crazy wretch,” she screams at them, spit flying from her mouth, only to freeze in the air. “Then this phenomenon, of your grim design, is nothing but a cheap magic trick!”

“I apologize,” comes a familiar voice. It resonates from above. She only sees darkness, looking up. 

“James? Is that my James?”

The spider descends onto her lap. She can feel its weight pinning her in place. It has a

face of anguish. “It is me, Lillian. I am so very sorry. The details of my visitation were unknown to me. Though, now it seems I have waited too long, out of fear of my form, and you have suffered.”

Her hands shaking, she forces them forward to the sides of James’ face, all that is left of what she knew. “But…. but here you are now,” A trembling oscillation infects the tone. “A promise fulfilled.”

It, or he, looks up at her with pure emotionlessness. It makes her shiver. “Do I not disgust you,” 

“No,” she says.

“You’re lying to me, and all I ask is honesty.”

“I’ll not say that you disgust me,” but tears now stream down her cheeks. 

“Then…. Prove yourself,” It smiles now, cheshire, perhaps hungry. “Kiss me, as you once did.”

It creeps, with the slowness of insectoid purpose, an instinctual movement, up her chest so that their faces are now level. Lillian notes how terribly scentless James has become, how his face holds the visages of statues, ones carved by those who may have never seen a human face in motion. Where are the subtleties of resting muscles? 

“Of course,” she says, and kisses him. His mouth is cold, tasteless. He slides his tongue down her throat, and into her thoughts…. 

Visions begin to implode and explode within her mind, no, wait, it’s just shape and color, refining now, with detail, please, and now things with labels. Red, that’s called blood, Lillian. White, that’s called bone, Lillian. She hears herself screaming from some far off place. If you can’t put your finger on it, did it matter in the first place? She sees tendons snapping, battered brains, crooked fingers, distortion of form, contracted limbs, there’s a pile of teeth that towers a mile into the sky, jawbones get their own pile. There’s an applause, she cannot see a crowd anywhere. The tower of teeth sways, tipping and tipping, and crashes down upon her….

When she wakes, the sun is shining through the window. The clock is ticking. The fireplace is dark, so she gets it burning again. Her sister, Gloria, had written her a letter, which urged her to come and live with her, so that they might rekindle the friendship they had once had as girls. “There’s a beautiful forest near the house,” she wrote. “And your niece would very much like to meet you. She is nine years of age now, and reminds me of you in everything she does. Wait no longer, dear sister. Nothing but love and opportunity await you here.”

Lillian glances back at the journal. Without any hesitation to speak of, she tosses it into the fire, watching as it turns to ash.