Cole Martin is a twenty-something writer from Atlantic Canada. He has a chapbook through dogleech books (pulp.), and his short fiction and non-fiction can be found on his Substack.
“This piece is about a real clock—a Mauthe mantel clock, though I’m not sure of the year—and a real family story.”
Growing up, I was told that the second my grandmother died, all the clocks in our house stopped. My mother only kept one of them. It adorned a cabinet in the room that is all rooms: a third office; a third dining room (ignored year-round until Christmas dinner); a third storage for all the china we never used; and more thirds, I’m sure, beyond those.
The clock was a squat antique, with its arms standing sentinel at 3:02 AM. A dreadful time of day to be alive, but not such a bad one to die, I reckon.
Whenever I needed to grab something from the everything/nothing room, I’d always stop and stare at. I felt compelled to; it arrested me, made me like its arms, silent and taut. What I remember most is how loud it looked. It should have been making all kinds of noise, like old clocks do. But I guess that’s what death does: it quiets things. Makes them small and trembling until, like a fever, it passes. Gone, but never far.
After I was told about the clock, I’d wake up each morning at 3:02 AM sharp. Like clockwork, I suppose. I swore I could hear it ticking, drawing me from my bed. I became obsessed with seconds; I’d count them in my head whenever I was with my mother, and I’d tally them up at the end of each day. I wondered how many of our seconds would overlap, how many hers did with her mother’s. At some point, I stopped counting.
When my mother died, the clock stopped again. Advanced, rather. To 7:41 PM—a better time to both live and die, just after dinner and, ideally, with a belly full of tea. I was packing up her stuff when I first noticed it. It was strange seeing the clock’s arms in a different position, as if, on a whim, the laws of nature had become suggestion.
Again, it altered my sleep. I woke, as always, at 3:02 AM, but I started falling asleep at 7:41 PM. No matter what, at 7:41 PM, I drop until 3:02 AM. From death to death, I too, die.
In that time, I go to the other place. It’s not so different from this one, only very loud. The clocks never stop turning there, and their sonorous ticking pervades every corner of my mind. I think it is like the everything/nothing room: visited, but largely forgotten. I wake up tired because there is no rest to be found there. Sometimes I think there can be no rest so long as time persists, so long as there are seconds to count.
A person, in the everything/nothing place, is a clock on a mantel. I search for my mother and my grandmother, but there are too many. So I stop and stare at those I can, and I wonder about the overlap of our seconds, and how many thirds we’re divided into.
