(Project for my creative writing class and I’m so done with it I hate it omg but I haven’t posted in like five years and it’s finally finished-ish so…enjoy maybe?)

8:00 P.M.

The linen blanket is cold. My head rests on the pillow, which is uncomfortably room temperature. There is an analog clock stuck to the wall, its face staring at mine. I turn on my side and grip the blanket with my fingertips, pulling it over my shoulder, but I can still see the clock out of the corner of my eye. My eyelids roll down like a projector screen until my eyelashes meet. Then there is a click. My eyes snap open. The minute hand has moved, it’s now 8:01. 

8:59 P.M.

There is a pool of sweat under my side that sticks to the sheet. My ankles are glued together and my hair feels like straw. Five minutes ago the hand made a painfully loud tick. Slowly, I close my eyes again, avoiding the clock’s gaze. After another agonizing minute, it becomes 9:00.

9:07 P.M.

I am still awake. I will not close my eyes again until 9:08. They stay stuck to the ceiling, because if I move, my gaze will find the face of the clock looking, looking, and looking at me. And the giant ten squeezed between the eleven and twelve will open its fish-like mouth and swallow me from the throat up, so I will not move, until my bed turns into a coffin and the polished floorboards below me melt into grass.

10:21 P.M.

It has been two hours and twenty-one minutes since I first laid down. My hand knocks over the styrofoam coffee cup that was resting on the nightstand. I bought it at 9:05 this morning down the street. It cost four dollars and eight cents, which I know because when I pulled the wadded dollar bills from my back pocket, the woman manning the cash register gave me a weird look. She told me to hurry, hurry, hurry up, we didn’t have all day. A puffy coat bumped into my arm. It was seaweed colored. Someone may have been talking, or yelling, or both. All I really remember is that I glanced down at my wrist and saw the angry, red numbers screaming at me through the glass. At 9:10 I was walking back up to my hotel with an orange in my hands, scraping off the peel and watching it fall on the sidewalk in pieces. The orange skin followed me all the way home. When I walked into the lobby I ate a slice of the fruit, but the flesh was all crumbly in my mouth. It tasted like my mother’s coffee cake. 

10:46 P.M.

The cup has been on the floor for a while; I do not remember if the coffee was any good. The clock feels louder. I pull the blanket up over my face, to hide myself, but it gets louder. My thoughts move clockwise around my skull. And it gets louder, and the sound forces itself down my throat, and I choke on it more than I did fifteen years ago when my mom was screaming in my ear, her fingers prying open my jaw and shoving a metal spoon down my mouth. I vomited up coffee cake on the dirty bathroom floor. She was angry because I made her late. Now look, look, look at her because she was all ready for work and I was spitting up cinnamon on the linoleum. My mom hated being late because it infected her as it was infecting me. She used to say I’d be late to my own funeral. I always worry that’s true.

11:00 P.M. 

There’s an analog clock hanging on the wall, pretending not to be me. My bed is starting to feel like a casket.   

11:02

I sit up, slowly, pushing the blanket off my face. There is a lump of chalk in my throat as I stare at the numbers on the wall. Three, four, five-six-seven. Seven. Seven. Seven. Seven. 11:07. Seven. The clock says not to sleep before eight. Eight. Dinner is at 8:00. Eight. Eight. Eight. Eight. Eight.

11:08 P.M.

I never ate dinner today. The last thing I had was that orange. I always forget to eat, there’s never enough time in one day. 

11:09 P.M. 

I can feel two things; the gravel beneath the rubber of my shoes while stepping out the car and walking up my parents driveway, and the clock staring at me from under the blanket. It reminds me of the one at home. The last time I saw it, it was above the door. Or maybe in the hallway. Or the bedroom. Or not in the bedroom but outside the bedroom, or above the oven in the kitchen, or in the microwave, or outside in the sky, or in the living_ _room, where I believe I eventually caught it melting hours of the day into numbers that skate between its incisors. Then my mother appeared, hunched over like a rat, her spine bent, coughing up anti-aging cream again. My teeth smiled at her. We sat down to eat. She cut an apple in half and fed me the seeds, surgically removing words of approval from her tongue. A job, that’s good news, she said. Mom, I said, this isn’t enough to eat. No, it's perfectly healthy, she chastised, you’re perfectly healthy. But I’m hungry. Times up, dinner’s over, the clock in the room shouts at us. My mother shouts with it. Maybe the clock is the same as this one. It could be. 

11:36 P.M.

My legs are crossed. My hands are folded. My fingertips are whitening. They itch.

11:59 P.M.

My fingertips itch. My fingertips itch. My fingertips are covered in clumps of brown sugar, crawling on my skin. I rip the monster off the wall. It clatters to the ground and dies.