TimeSure

Blue light scattered across the floor of a carpet so trampled of forgotten dust that the original colour be best assumed without basis. It was a saturated light, one that did little to give form to any of the objects that it was cast across; rather, giving them allusion of objects, the faint outline of cotton-bald socks, the edges of an empty bottle. The light blinks and waking eyes would see a clock resetting, the cheap plastic surrounding its wavering display half-fused to the mantel that it rests upon.

This is an old clock, too obscure to be an antique and too peculiar to ever be found again, the original manufacturer surely disappeared. Disappeared into the mists of time, disappeared with their expectations of a clock, such as this, still operating.
The brand itself claims to be known as ‘TimeSure’ and its mark simply states that it is “MADE”. This defiance of electronics has run without changed battery or remembrance of purchase since it was placed on the mantle and only now has it faltered.

Blink on

Blink off

…

Arlow wakes and sees the failed time blinking in the half-light of an unknown hour. He feels familiar within this failed time: these times of failure.
Grumbling, he pulls the blanked over his head and thumps some volume back into a fatigued pillow.

Blink on
Blink off

The room is dark. From the depths of the kitchen, the fridge compressor kicks into action and Arlow remits into becoming helplessly awake. He stares at the peeling roof, the shadow of curled wallpaper drawing odd lines between each blink of his clock’s lost time.
Was it wallpaper? He thought, unable to return to rest. Long caught by sleeplessness, distracted thoughts dream uneasily and clefs of paint escape definition on this night.
Broken then, the gasping buzz of his alarm was to be henceforth silenced, it was a struggle to set up when the clock was new, and Arlow gave himself little chance of being able to achieve the same feat twice.
Technology frustrated Arlow. Such a simple device forgetting its sole function felt more poignant than it rightly should. Everything needed fixing these days, other people needed to fix whatever so that the last folk’s mistakes could be patched up from a time before.

Blink on
Blink off

Who would fix his clock?
They’d say throw it away for sure and he’d be buying something made from the new bones of drink bottles, itself holding two times more broken features that his broken clock could dream of failing to achieve.
It was cold.

Patience waning, the mental arithmetic of temperature and desire to sleep was tipped. Arlow winced as he rolled onto his side and plucked the clock from the mantle beside his bed; a sharp pop sounding as the unmoulded plastic separated from where it had rested with passive anxiety.
‘What a time to break,’ he said as the stuttering display read 00:00 with the occasional interference whenever the device was moved beyond its expected stillness.
Thumping the clock on its side, the display crackled with static, and the blue light failed for a moment, the room vanishing into sloe-black darkness. Two thumps returned the display and a fourth caused a distortion of the numbers. The light was solid now, whatever internal trouble within the circuit board had presumably been shifted off in some positive way.
Turning the plastic rectangle over in his hands, Arlow felt the tacky waste of its surface and wondered how grey plastic could yellow beyond the recognition of its original colour.

The display was timeless. Thumping once more, A single character appeared on the display but was outside the realm of numeracy to a concerning degree.

“H”, the blue letter proclaimed, a cathode-like fuzz intermingling with the blue background of the curved glass screen.
Arlow was not one for gadgets. LED, nixie, these were just dusty words that he knew of but had never really cared for the definition to.
He had known that this display was unusual though, once joking that it was made from old nuclear reactors. Thinking on his humour, the radiatingly deep blue now looked to him as a shade falling upon the wrong side of natural and he placed the clock back where it had sat for twenty years of record.

“&” appeared next to the H.
Peering closer, Arlow regarded the appeared ampersand with incongruity. Never had he seen his clock display a loopful character such as the ampersand, let alone would he have considered it to have been able to. The numbers that it had cycled through in the past were boxy, square representations of 7 lines that in themselves comprised 10 numerals. This was cursive and obscure.
Pressing the snooze button, the clock then blinked in four static lines and a bright “10” filled the room with a starker hue than Arlow was expecting.
Kicking the blanket from his legs, Arlow sat up and pressed snooze again.

“9”

“8”

“7”

The numbers began counting down of their own accord.

“6”

“5”

Jabbing the snooze button once again, Arlow panicked and pushed the small plastic clock from the mantle where it then clattered to the floor with a cheaply weightless thud. Westing over the bed, Arlow saw the open carcase of his ancient timepiece upon the floor, its battery enclosure pried open, crusted AAAs tossed aside like unwanted garbage.
But the display was still illuminated and in the still black of an unknown time a small trace of dread now began to eek into Arlow’s heart.

“4”

“3”

In panic, Arlow tumbled onto the floor and smothered the small digital clock with a time worn pillow, closing his eyes and awaiting some calamity or explosion of fire and destruction.
10 seconds, a minute must has passed, and nothing occurred.

With trepidation, Arlow then lifted the pillow and witnessed a three transform into a two before roughly slamming his hands back over the stricken blue display, as if its unsighted witness was halting the countdown alone.
What was he to do? Two becomes one and what then? Would TimeSure tick across the screen with neutrally lethargic speed and the clock would rest? There was something more menacing to the countdown. Each number rolled with a weight that didn’t care about sequence. The clock wanted him to know that it was counting down, that it was two short beats from zero and that whatever zero meant was something that should be paid attention to.

Minutes passed and Arlow held his hands over the clock.
His arms shook, his mind wandered, wondering if the countdown was a half-dream and his distress was laughful.

He opened his fingers.

…

“1”

Ok, not a dream.
Slamming the clock into the sock drawer, Arlow sprung to his feet and made from his bedroom, careening into the cupboard wall, and punching a hole in the cheap fibreboard with his elbow.
Now hearing a groaning whirr rumble from behind him, the distressed Arlow kicked through his front door and stormed out into the street wearing only his underpants and a stained t-shirt.
The street was empty albeit for the hostile white light of streetlamps. A sheen of rain had left pastel colour deep imprinted into the bitumen, and a wind stirred what was otherwise a still winter’s night.
Arlow’s eyes ached, the lingering blue of the display hung off the corner of his vision.

Blink once

Blink twice

Light, a tremendous font of blue light burst from the windows of Arlow’s house like a beam of pure substance.
It shot across the road, precariously missing the half-dressed Arlow, passing through the opposite house and then the several beyond.
A wall of blue colour, pure and absolute, stretched omnipresently across the road and Arlow could only look upon it in terror.

Slowly, as if with mechanical regiment, faint lines of a lighter blue then passed across the beam, their form scratched into the colour with ridged accuracy.
Arlow watched, because he could not blink.
Time continued, because it was told to do so.

Across the light, across that inescapable blue vortex, a single line of text did then appear.                    

TimeSure,
You cannot escape time…