Every eye was on her, watching as she held her arms to the sky in offering and devotion. Their gazes were seeking, pressuring, begging her to break the slow, circular formation. She knew better than to listen to their silent pleas after all the years, all the mornings, all the evenings. The sun and moon above had filled her with delicate gears and minute machinery, birthed her, and the daughter of time was not one to disobey. She was just a clock upon the wall, but still she carried the weight of a dimension on her shoulders. The instinctive, impulsive rush to direct her arms this way that pulsed through her with every breath. The tick, tick, tick inside her rang quietly and steadily as it had for all that she’d ever known. This was her role. It was all she had ever known, and all that she could over be. Minute after minute, hour after hour, day after day, this would forever and always be her duty. Others would come and go from her space, filling their role as shortly as her hands met in the sky and she commanded them away, while others would stay just long enough for her to see them go with a mechanical pang of sorrow. Rarely did they ever truly see the woman on the wall. She met eyes with the man across the room. He had been in their space for nearly as long as she had, matching the paleness of her face in half of his stripes and the stars that adorned him like tattoos. He had a vibrant, violent shade to him that she could only see in herself with every sharp, perfected breath placed just between the seconds. His smile was bold and stark as a flag against a landscape, and sometimes she found herself staring for self-made hours at it.
He waved, sometimes, to her. Other times he would lay there, lifeless, as if forgotten and abandoned. No matter what, his eyes always reflected with only half in-agreement to what he said, and no matter what, he never seemed to mind her neverending quietness. Every morning, as she waved to the sun above, the passing creatures faced him and spoke, sometimes in unison and sometimes not at all, to him. She’s caught their words in segments and syllables, “I pledge… of the United… and to the Republic… justice for all,” and wondered what they could possibly be asking of him so regularly. Now, the faceless, confusing little creatures watched her closely. Their eyes traced the breathing movements of her body, as if counting each inhale and exhale, each minute quiver in the tendons of her arm. Each internal tick seemed to viscerally disquiet them and force them to squirm like bugs down below. The uncatchable words of one the creatures, a face she saw the most of them all, carried on like a desert plane. Their words, blonde and sanitized, seemed to envelop the space but not one of the smaller ones listened. Instead they bored their eyes onto her. Each movement of her arm approaching that just-right groove in her joint entranced them. She could almost taste their words on her own tongue, convincing her to move faster, to break her oaths. She would not be swayed. But voices grew from their bodies and jarring sound from their mouths. Yelling was hurled across the room. They seemed all but frantic. Frantic, at her. The noise and their eyes built and built and built. Then, finally, a deafening, sharp chorus rang out. The creatures, with their indistinguishable faces and loud, blooming voices left. All the rush of their anticipation evaporated at once. The man swayed softly on his feet, as if in a sigh of relief, and it was quiet once again. She knew this routine, as she knew many others. The sole remainder of the landscape grabbed and misplaced and organized the room to their content. They did not spare a glance to her, or the man, or much else. By a few degrees of her arm, they would step out of the room and leave it quiet, still, until she carved a circle and some from the space around her. She watched with glossy eyes as they did exactly so, the same movements and patterns as every other day. A glimpse of brightness appeared in the base of her sight as they passed somewhere under her to a world behind, to Plato’s cave, and the incessant tick, tick, tick of her chest caged the longing of her heart back into this stale world. Across the room, the stripped man said nothing. The routine continued. The steaming crush of hatred rolled over her, just as it did every time. The mechanisms in her pulled against her skin, longing to be free, to stretch, and instead she closed her eyes and did only what she knew instead. She hated this. More than anything, she loathed the quiet where only the quiet creak of her joints could be heard, where her breaths came out just as even and timed as always. This duty pressed against her from the inside out and the hand it had around her throat, around her ankles, was a pressure she felt greatest now. “What a long day,” the man spoke with his perfect teeth and conflicted eyes. His words carried as if over the space and not through it, “Though I suppose it’s all the same to you, right?” She didn’t muse him with an answer. The silence stretched.
She resented the man, with his colors and smiles and half-way disposition. He smiled sometimes, he waved sometimes, he talked to her and to no one at all sometimes. She filled her role, her duty, always. He held autonomy in fumbling hands while she laid strapped, caged, as nothing more than the tick, tick, tick she was designed to serve.
The bell had passed, but the shrill ring in her ears pounded against her skull. Resentment boiled in her stomach, bubbling and sticky like tar. The wonder of what more there was burned against the inside of her eyelids. Every hour, every minute, and every second she dictated killed her from the inside out this way. The tar that bubbled up her throat, the weight of purpose at her throat, and the bright, bold smile of the man across from her killed her. She was tired of being killed. She was tired of being a daughter of time. With impulse she allowed her arms to suddenly weigh on her. They were getting tired, anyway, her mind told her. Ticking screamed in her veins, reverberated from her lungs out, but she held her breath for the first time ever. Nothing collapsed, she did not die. The man did not even notice. Her entire body shook in surprise. She forced the forgotten bend in her arms to break the perfect circle she lived in. The sun did not come down to yell at her. The moon did not darken the sky or demand for her to be fixed. The air smelt almost metallic, on the edge. Everything laid poised for her. The ticking pounded in her chest now, almost trying to anchor her in place. Her knees curled tighter, then stretched out like breaking plastic beneath her. The shrill scraping of metal to metal bloomed in every corner of her body as overdue, permanent aches set into the line of her shoulders. A gasp pressed through her mouth, unfamiliar tasting on her tongue and a stranger against her lips. Something akin to a voice lined it, and she wondered how she could hear it past the deafening ticks. It occurred to her only distantly that it was her voice. The man, shocked back into reality, stared at her, or in her direction, as if he could not conceive she had made any sound. She watched, through an agonizing thrum against her skull, as shock carved line by line into the shape of his face. She almost laughed. “What are you–” He shouted to her, maybe at her, but she did not hear– “Where are you going?”
She gave a breathless, uneven laugh. With one final tearing yank, she pulled herself free from the wall. Then, on bare, unsteady feet, she stumbled out of the world.
