Don’t look at it. Something inside ticked like a beating heart. She poured herself another cup of tea, her hand trembling as she held the mug steady beneath the kettle. It had been so long since she’d looked. When he left, they were at a strict right angle, but the hands could have been pointing in any direction by then. Perhaps time itself had stopped. Her eyes flicked away for a fraction of a second and her grip shifted. Scalding water splashed onto her thumb and she swore, the mug smashed at her feet. Little ceramic shards were now sprawled over the tile, and she swore again, the empty apartment buzzing with a sudden disturbance. She held her finger in her mouth, and flecks of nail polish broke off in her saliva. A wet tongue wriggled over the tender skin, looking for signs of blistering. She pictured flesh bubbling into asphalt. Did she kiss him goodbye? She’d made him, yes, he’d rolled his eyes.
“Please don’t stay up waiting,” he’d said, readjusting his duffel.
She frowned. Someone standing behind him tugged on his arm to leave, but they were obscured in the fading light. A tinted-out car waited impatiently across the street.
“Don’t look at me like that,” he said, “I’ll be back before you’re awake.”
Someone called his name from the back window.
“You know why I have to go.”
His eyes were glazed over, not meeting hers, and his head was already out there, behind a barricade. She chewed on the corner of her nail, eyes puffy and emptied of tears. Stale work clothes hung loosely from her bones.
The figure stepped forward, and the two of them turned to leave. She hastily leaned her cheek towards Tom and his lips brushed across her right dimple as he slunk off. A moment later the car skidded into the dusky evening.
Her thumb was a little red, nothing more. She pulled a hair out of her mouth and took down another cup from the shelf. The teabag sagged at the bottom, releasing spurts of burgundy with every gush of steaming water. She didn’t feel like tea. The mug was lined up next to the others. All were untouched and gone cold, their handles pointed outwards like bent limbs. The kettle got refilled anyway.
The clock kept drumming its persistent rhythm, and she kept hoping it would cry itself out. She pictured which way the hands were configured, perhaps in a straight vertical line like a ballerina, or almost on top of each other in a sharp arrowhead. Impossible to say. It was dark outside. She knew that a lot of time had passed, too much of it. She refused to attend to the phone, though she kept her ringer on. The only way to gauge time was the clock, and there was no force in the world that would make her look, because if she looked, then she would know. He’d be back soon anyway, he never ate beforehand.
“At least take some with you,” she’d pleaded.
Tom just grunted, using his body to conceal what he was stuffing into a black, canvas bag.
“I’ve seen it all, Tom. Are we going to do this ritual again?”
She heard the clinking of metal as he scooped it over his shoulder.
“We don’t have to do anything,” he teased, drawing her into him.
“Ha-ha. Smart arse, you know what I mean.”
He pretended to bite her nose. She had laughed, and he had slid a handgun down the back of his belt.
With nothing left to tidy or otherwise busy herself, her legs tapped weakly beneath the kitchen table. The whites of her eyes had started to dry out and sting, the way they do with a lack of sleep. Her palms smoothed her shirt over her torso, they searched for ribs and found them. Veins ran down her pale forearms like cracked porcelain. She used one of these limbs to swat at a fly that had landed on the chicken. The brown thing slumped in the middle of the table on a platter of wilted vegetables. It had gone stale and toughened in the cold air, but Tom would need a plate when he returned.
From the table, she could view the whole apartment laid out before her. On the wall behind her she felt the clock leaning its face toward the back of her neck. She stood abruptly and paced into the living room. Wet pieces of mug stuck to her soles. Before she knew it, her hands were sliding down the sides of the couch, fingers venturing through the crevices between coins until a hard corner emerged. She drew the remote and switched on the TV. The nature channel. The ants rushed forward in waves, and the forest floor became a black, writhing sea. The air, too, was saturated with flashes of white and blue, refracting off the wings of insects who blurred past like stray bullets. A fallen bee lay on its side in the undergrowth. The ants moved as one and engulfed him. One carried off a bent wing, another clamped an eye between its two pincers. When the sea parted, there was nothing left—
The screen turned dark as instantly as it had been illuminated. Her finger moved on its own. She stared at the lifeless TV for a long time, but the images remained there, swirling in her reflection, arms cradling rifles, faces obscured by balaclavas. She forced the remote back between the folds of the couch. Only as the room regained its stillness could she heave a lungful of air. To her surprise, it came out as a dry, strained sob. She hurried into the kitchen. There were no tea bags left. Hot water would have to do.
At the table again. The chicken had turned greyish and developed the damp smell of old cardboard. Her nails had been bitten flush to the skin, so she began to chew past the cuticles, into pink flesh. She liked that part of herself so much more than the pale skin, which seemed lifeless compared to her vibrant insides. From where the cold bird was positioned, she could see right up inside it. There was no stuffing, she must have forgotten. She gazed into the void between its legs, sucking on her finger until the taste of blood stopped— she stood up quickly, as if compelled to. Every time she seemed to settle into this sort of trance, she felt a pressure in her chest and would find herself suddenly standing and moving somewhere else. Perhaps this was the body’s way of keeping her alive. It must have thought she was dying but wouldn’t allow it. Though, she was sure that she had never slipped into unconsciousness. The ticking had never stopped. Blink to stay awake.
She found herself standing with her nose almost pressed against the clock. It was the first time she dared even glimpse at the time. But she found only a ring of black numbers. Both hands were missing, and yet it ticked, ticked on. She felt like laughing but was too afraid of crying. She could see herself distorted in the glass, her head became large and curved with the contour of the plastic.
In an instant, she found herself ripping it off the wall, chunks of white plaster flying into the air as the screw tore out. Her hands felt around the back of it, searching desperately for a tab. There. The bleeding tips of her fingers fumbled with the slippery batteries. She screamed but produced no sound. Her right canine tooth plunged into the gap between the plastic and lithium battery and forcefully prised it open. The batteries clattered to the floor, and the sound disappeared.
It dropped onto the table with a wooden thud, and she stood over it, sighing.
She stretched her spine straight as she closed her eyes. Her head tilted back a little, and the skin pulled taught from her collarbone. It went back further, almost as far as it could go. Mouth agape, she breathed deeper, trying to extract every morsel of air from the room. As she did this, her arms locked straight at the elbow. They began to rise on either side of her until her palms met above her head. Under the sterile kitchen lights, her skin was pearlescent and plastic, her body rigid, her muscles tense and wooden like a spear pointing towards the ceiling. Her hand twitched. Her heartbeat pounded behind her ears, a metronome buried within her ribs. Tick. Tick. Her entire left arm twitched this time, then again, and again. It was happening in time with the contractions of her heart. It twitched again, but this time the arm hinged at the shoulder, almost imperceptibly, it lowered. Then again. One arm ticked downwards in a circular pattern with each drum of fluid. The other remained upright. There was no blood left behind her eyes. Blink to stay awake. Her breathing stopped, until finally, her knees buckled. Her arms fell from their stiff positions, and she barely caught herself on the edge of the table. The kettle wailed.
This time, she shut it off without pouring anything out. She had used her last mug anyway, but the line of full ceramic cups didn’t bring the comfort that they seemed to before. They crowded her, and the room felt hot with bodies. She looked at them sitting there, in all their various colours and shapes, aligned in a strict row for so long that they had taken on personalities. They outnumbered her, and she couldn’t help but imagine they were scheming, planning a mutiny against her. The little bastards. One by one, she poured their contents out into the sink. When she was finished, she could do nothing except sit back down at the table. Her eyes were bloodshot, and her mind had been stretched far as a revolution unfolded in her head.
She tried sitting again, but had barely grazed the seat before she sprung up at the sight of something peculiar. Her forearms did not look as pale as before. In fact, as she held them up, the veins receded from the skin which turned a rich amber. They were entirely beautiful. There was a light coming from the front of the house that was filtering through the kitchen window. Headlights. She turned, frantic, pressing her face into the glass as an orange sun began to peak over the horizon.
