Tock, Tick, Tock, Tick

Breeze awoke to a beautiful Thursday morning; the sun was shining, the birds were singing, Arnold was still locked away in her wardrobe; it was a good day to be alive. Something was obviously wrong. The day had a wrong feeling about it. The air was filled with both sunshine and wrongness. A butterfly fluttered past her all wrongly. Everything was irrevocably and unequivocally not right.

Her radio sang ‘it’s a beautiful day’; wrong. The clock said 09:27; wrong. The calendar said it was a Thursday; wrong, wrong, wrong. The happy birds continued to chirp, as if they didn’t know what was going on.

‘Oh don’t give me that act.’ Breeze snapped as she pulled a pink polka dot pillow over her face.

‘Oh my, my, my, it’s a beautiful day.’ Her clock radio insisted but that was met with the rather harsh counter-argument of the far-end bedroom wall.

Crash.

She pushed the pillow away as she squinted through her distrustful eyelids.

‘Nope, it’s still off.’ She pouted.

Warily Breeze scampered to the edge of her bedroom, peering around her doorframe and stiffening up in case there was a Lucite Demon or a Mountains of Kong hound waiting to pounce. There wasn’t. Breeze sighed, a little relieved, but the bad feeling just wouldn’t go away, it had permeated her consciousness and enveloped her mind.

She headed for the safety of her kitchen – not that her kitchen was any better defended than the other rooms in her small, flat-pack furniture adorned London flat, if say, an invading army decided to besiege it – it was just the room that contained her coffee. She, much like the rest of her kind, was dreadfully addicted to the black stuff, to such a degree that she no longer called it her kitchen but instead the bean cupboard. She brewed up a cup and went to work on her latest artistic masterpiece, a marble bust of Anne Hathaway. And that’s when she saw it.

‘What the fudge?’ She asked, her gaze focusing in.

Breeze’s mechanical clock ticked backward. It was just the second hand, and it was just for one second, but this she knew, was what had been troubling her so. Most people would have cast this off as a trick of the eyes, or perhaps a functional problem with the gears, but Breeze was not most people. In fact Breeze wasn’t a person at all and certainly not more than one of them.

‘Oh, no, no, no, no! That’s… not good.’ Breeze squirmed.

You see, Breeze knew several important things about this clock. For one thing she knew she liked it far more than her digital clock radio (that now lay strewn in an array of pieces on her bedroom floor) because –

a.) It was a gift from her late mother

b.) It didn’t make audacious claims about the day

And c.) It was not in an array of pieces on her bedroom floor

Secondly she was aware that this family heirloom was so intricately crafted that it took one of the gears more than twenty-thousand years to do a single rotation; it was designed to last, and the metals it was made from would breakdown before this clock did. Finally, once many centuries ago she was told that if this very event ever happened it meant that something in the future was very terribly wrong.

***

At that very moment in the centre of London, just a few streets away from Temple station, in the Kings College Quantum Mechanics lab, some very clever, very rational, not at all spiritual scientists were studying the most irrational of all the mechanics. Actually at that very moment they were jumping up and down. They were not jumping up and down in anger, or because they had just seen a mouse (that was an hour before), they were jumping up and down because they were happy. They were happy because they had just performed an experiment and got the results they were hoping for.

These results, they hoped, would soon win them the Nobel Prize in physics – it would also rewrite humanity’s fundamental understanding of everything – but they were far more excited about the Nobel Prize in physics.

Using a magnetic confinement fusion reactor they compressed Ununoctium into a plasma so tight that it formed the tiniest of tiny neutron stars. The star existed only for a fraction of a zeptosecond, but that was long enough for its immense density to stretch space-time inwards, much like a physicist pulling in hangers-on when everyone thought they were on track for an award. And when that neutron star broke down, like the physicist when they were told they had not won said award, it radiated out a mass of bosons, exotic quarks and space-time waved out with them. That gravitational wave spread out into the Universe, akin to say, a meme of the physicist who broke down at the Nobel Prize awards.

The very clever, very rational, not at all spiritual scientists were expecting this wave, and thus had set up several Laser Interferometer Clocks and a rather powerful but under challenged (or so it claimed) Quantum Supercomputer to capture it. And it did capture it; the gravitational wave pushed back space-time by almost a whole second. Or so they had thought.

This was the first of a very many so called coincidences – so called by those who don’t understand the law of large numbers – that would eventually lead to the event, which would cause time to be pushed back on itself.

But they were not aware of their mistaken assumption, much like they weren’t aware that deep in a quiet street of Kilburn, lived a Wood Nymph that proved pretty much everything they had ever assumed about the Universe was absolutely, completely and utterly wrong. There may not be gods in the sky, but on occasion, there are fairies at the bottom of the garden, and a Wood Nymph that lived in a flat at the top of the garden, who often complained about the bloody fairies ruining her lovely garden. That Wood Nymph was Breeze, and at that moment she was fretting over the time.

 

***

 

Breeze, was growing into a tremendous panic. Today was definitely a write-off, there was no doubt about that. She normally spent her days, acrylic paints splattered around her, recreating images of giant flora and fauna filled alien worlds she has never known but could so easily be her home and had done so ever since finding the career progression of a Wood Nymph was rather limited. Yesterday she painted a postcard landscape of a small section of Epping Forest from an old photograph she’d taken two decades before, when she first moved to London. She had held her breath in anticipation that this one would stay as she painted it; when the tiny trees wafted their branches on the canvas she exhaled sadly, because it had not.

She was not painting today though; painting, much like most of her couch cushions, had gone out the window. They had gone out the window because Breeze was tearing apart half her flat searching for something.

‘Where the blueberry fudge are you?’ Breeze hissed as she pulled the rest of her sofa apart.

‘What’s up?’ Arnold called out cautiously from the oak panelled prison on hearing the ruckus in the other room.

‘Everything.’ Breeze yelled back.

‘Can you be more specific?’ Arnold responded a little testily.

‘I can’t find my safe key.’ Breeze clarified.

‘It’s probably the last place you saw it.’ Arnold said deliberately unhelpfully.

‘Don’t be so deliberately unhelpful.’ Breeze complained rather astutely.

‘Well… if you let me out of this cupboard I can be deliberately un-unhelpful.’

Breeze ignored the double negative as she gazed glumly at yesterday’s Epping attempt that sat sadly at the side. She felt as if it diminished her somehow. Her one frustration with her otherwise flawless works of art was that despite all the benefits that came with being a mythical magical being she transfused life into everything she loved, and as much as she tried not to, she loved her art. A flock of micro-birds scattered into the four corners of the frame.

‘I don’t even remember painting those.’ Breeze huffed moodily.

A small deer wandered into frame and Breeze snapped at it for ruining her painting; it scarpered majestically out of the landscape. She couldn’t stand staring at this… disappointment any longer and promptly picked it up to place in her storage trunk where she kept all her artistic travesties. She opened the lid to see a parade of pestering portraits and cavalcade of contentious Cubisms.

‘How can cubes come to life? They’re just cubes!’ She once decried.

Twinkling at the bottom of the trunk was the little key. It had evidently caught its chain on the back of one her previous painted monstrosities and was now hung helplessly.

‘There you are!’ Breeze exclaimed.

‘Yes I am and I’ve been here for the last bloody two weeks.’ Arnold snapped tartly.

‘And you can rot in there for another two for all I care.’ She spat back at her wardrobe.

‘Charming!’ Arnold sighed, genuinely insulted.

Breeze stormed back into her lounge, she may have found her key, but now she had to find her safe. Breeze has been accused of many flaws and most she’d deny, but not ditzy, she was definitely ditzy.

If you ever saw Breeze you’d imagine her as being happy go-lucky, thanks mostly to her extraordinarily colourful persona. Her hair is the colour of cotton candy at a Midwest fairground at sunset, but it changes almost weekly, sometimes daily. Her clothes exude life, at times they sparkle, on occasions flutter, but mostly they just say ‘this here, is a Wood Nymph that lives life without borders, without chains, without anyone or anything, be it philosophy, religion or even the President of the US of A stopping me from experiencing all of it’. The reason you might read that from her clothes is because she has a t-shirt with that written on it. It is her favourite t-shirt.

Her clothes literally exude life, or rather her leather jacket does, which she loves more than anything else in her wardrobe and as such has also come to life. Arnold, as it has come to call itself, after misreading its own label, is Breeze’s best friend, and at times a pretty good drinking buddy. But it can also be incredibly offensive and that is why it is currently locked away in her wardrobe having to make painful conversations with a stoned bandana Breeze bought at the Isles of Wight festival, which is so infused with the smell of marijuana, has not yet come down.

Breeze was so stoned at that festival she felt a cosmic love for everyone and everything she saw, bringing to life her new bandana, several daffodils, a woman’s blue hair and a Mr Steven Oakes of West Crawley, who had collapsed and stopped breathing. Doctors declared his recovery a medical miracle but it was actually a very mellow Wood Nymph, which is less miraculous than you might expect.

She tore open her wardrobe door looking for the safe and caught her bandana mid-flow a lecture on dust motes.

‘…they just float around without a care in the world. Woah look at that one! It went to the left, and now like, it’s not going to the left. Awesome.’ Said the Bandana.

Arnold had the look of a leather jacket in great distress, you could even say the leather looked distressed, but you shouldn’t.

‘For the love of Gore-tex. Thank you.’ Arnold cried out.

‘I’m not here for you.’ Breeze said sticking out a tongue. ‘Something is terribly wrong.’

‘I know something is terribly wrong, I’ve been stuck listening to this stoned bloody idiot bandana for the last two weeks!’ Arnold complained gestating as it did so.

‘Hey, hey, hey! Not cool man, I have a name you know.’ The bandana droned.

‘What is it?’ Arnold sighed exasperated.

‘It’s er… Bandana! And don’t you forget it! Wait, or is it?’

Breeze ignored this exhilarating conversation as she opened her safe. Small in appearance it could store a remarkable number of things; it was like what would happen if the Tardis and Mary Poppins’ handbag mated and had a rather metallic looking baby.

She pulled out a box and slammed both doors shut to the horror of Arnold and slow surprise of Bandana. Hesitantly she set it down on her lounge coffee table (although to Wood Nymphs all tables were coffee tables) and lifted the lid.

‘What’cha doin’?’ Koosh asked peering over her shoulder.

Breeze was rather little, not just in her diminutive stature, but also in personality. She might be over twelve hundred years old but she acts at times as if she was only three hundred and twenty-seven. For example she has a collection of ten stuffed toys that she talks to; seven of her toys talks back, she has no idea why the other three don’t. By far the most demanding of these was her raccoon Koosh. Much like the Sirens of Titan, small, cuddly and with big twinkling eyes Koosh has led many to their folly.

‘I said watch’ya doin’?’ Koosh repeated, deliberately enunciating each vowel separately to express its agitation.

‘I’m checking something out.’ Breeze responded not breaking her vision from the box.

‘That something better be how long it’ll take to get me a goddamn bagel.’ Koosh said climbing into Breeze’s lap, its voice filled with subtle malice.

‘You can’t eat bagels, you’re a stuffed toy.’ Breeze said, her voice growing distant in distraction.

‘I know I can’t eat bagels!’ It snapped. ‘I just like sitting on them. I like to pretend I’m in one of those round inflatable doughnuts, flying down a waterslide.’ Koosh raised its little arms in the air and mimed quickly careering around corners.

Breeze didn’t respond, her mind had drifted on into a daydream; her breath heavy, her heart rate slow and hard. She lifted the lid of a rather poultry cardboard box to reveal a very ornate book. It was maroon leather bound and in gold leaf was written Happy Memories. She opened to one of the random almost endless pages to see a photograph of her as a young girl.

‘Oh my…’ Breeze gasped in humorous delight and a little shame. ‘Look at my hair!’

She showed off the picture of her with golden scraggly curls to Koosh, who had already lost interest in the whole affair and was scuttling off to the corner of the sofa to continue reading its copy of Love in the Time of Cholera. Flipping through the endless photographs she saw captured moments of her aunts, uncles and parents, all minor deities once worshipped now forgotten.

‘Little moments in time…’ She whispered a phrase she once heard Hitchcock use.

Photographs, as she often considered, were the embodiment of how she tried to live her life. Breeze was always looking to the future, racing forward, in the hopes that one day she could finally stop and just live a perfect moment forever; well, when she finally finds one. To Breeze, photography is just that, finding perfect moments in time to capture jealously, trying keep them forever. But the act of capturing those moments somehow makes them imperfect. They never look as good as we remember; it’s a facsimile, and in being copied the moment in time becomes distorted, the colours run, the lines crinkle, the memory becomes less beautiful, spoilt even.

That’s why she hated this book – or at least one reason why – it reminded her of the imperfection in her past the way that nostalgia somehow spoils.

‘Nostalgia is like walking into a ghost town; you’re haunted by what used to be there but has long since passed.’ She had once said to Arnold. ‘Perhaps it’s the nostalgia that’s really being captured by the camera, not the light in the lens.’

Arnold never responded, it just kept drinking its Tequila.

‘All of these photos have a filter applied to them, a filter of the dim gloom of death. That’s all nostalgia is I guess, the slow break down of the past, a sort of entropy.’

She looked at the photos of the most recent parts of her life and frowned. The spoiled lines seemed even more spoilt, the colours charcoaled, the imprint of decay ever more present. She skipped on ahead to the later pages that she hadn’t as yet filled yet with living. The pages were blank.

‘Wait… no. Oh this is bad.’ She squirmed.

She flicked through the rest of the pages near the end but they were all completely blank. Jumping back, she turned to as close to today as she could find and there she saw something that made her face wilt and blood turn cold. The photo of her was smouldering, billowing smoke. She snapped the book shut and threw it to the floor. Curling her knees up under her chin she shook vigorously, as if entropy’s growing vice had turned the whole room into ice. She shuddered, gripped by an overwhelming sense of the end.

‘Please…’ Breeze begged Time to continue traversing its destined path.

Desperately she stared at her mother’s clock, willing it to keep ticking forward and so it did, but noticeably slowly, as if the mechanism was pushing through a tremendous current.

Koosh alert to Breeze’s change in attention took this as an opening and reverted back to the most pertinent thought of the day,

‘Bagel!’ Koosh yelled. ‘Bagel! Bagel! Bagel’ it demanded half dancing as it did so.

To Breeze the voice was like a wisp in the wind, floating distantly past her. Her unblinking eyes watered but her gaze would not shift. The second hand stopped.

‘No.’ Her own voice whispered out as distant to her as any other.

The pause seemed to fill a lifetime before the mechanism creakily pushed forward. Breeze’s breath left her like a weight leaving a scale. Her eyes drooped and her body relaxed, she looked back to the clock face, as if hoping for a nod, a smile, some resemblance of reassurance but instead the second hand paused once more.

‘You can do it.’ She pleaded, hoping her words of encouragement could somehow be understood.

It was fighting, Breeze could tell it was fighting as hard as it could, but inevitably it was overwhelmed. The second hand ticked backwards, not once, not twice, but thrice. The anxiety pounded at her mind and in a rush all her senses came flooding to the fore. Overwhelmed and overburdened Breeze’s head dropped into a silent weep. Time was ending and all she could do was cry. Her thoughts suddenly consumed by the noise of her own tears and that of the little stuffed toy by her side.

‘Bagel, bagel, bagel, bagel, bagel…’ Koosh repeated into an ever decreasing infinity.