Seconds to Hours

A Story by Alchemist

The journal of a day. One of my days. Written in the third person, as I tend to do. I don't know why I do this.

Seconds to Hours

Ding..ding, ding.......ding. A sad little melody played itself out. He looked up from his work to see that he had brushed the windchimes with his head. Ding..ding, ding.......ding. Ding..ding, ding.............ding. He watched the clapper strike the same series of notes for a few bars before it finally slowed and the tune left him alone once more. A sad kind of smile shapes his face as he looks back down to the dishes he had been washing. He performs the chore mechanically, for he is elsewhere now. Another day closes, he has loved, without expectation. He is weary. Yet he finds that the words must come tonight. They have cried out to him in the day, pleading for release, and now that it is night, they rage to come forth. They have come, and have much to say. They will not wait much longer.

Soft, thoughtful music plays for him at his chore. Not his music, just others that he lets in frequently. Some old friends and some new, but he trusts them all, and lets their notes travel to the deep places. That is where he is as his hands start to prune in the hot water. He is traveling to the places that know only of him. Places that bow to his will, for was he not their creator? Elegant light filled places that was life itself and dark wonders that waited and hid beneath dead mountains. All of these places he goes as the music plays on. A dish raps against the edge of the sink. He rinses and sets it in its place. He continues to love, without expectation.

His mind goes back to when it happened. The endless cycle of the morning commute had been interrupted that morning. Oh, yes it had. He remembers the brake lights of the vehicles in front of him. All of them simultaneously erupting in a flood of red. Like blood? The rear ends of those same automobiles bucked up from the intensity of the panicked stopping of their owners. He followed suit, eyes dashing through the gaps and breaks that appeared between the now sliding cars. He went right, the shoulder of the road. Still moving fast, but slowing. Gauging how best to avoid whatever unknown carnage awaited him on the sunlit freeway.

His car left the road just enough to give an un-obstructed view of the accident still in progress. The large truck with the gleaming steel tank on its side, still plowing through the ditch and throwing up dirt like some energetic and neurotic dog digging in the back yard. So close was he to it, he half expected whatever liquid that was inside that tank to explode over him, around him, through him. His eye shifted to a flash of yellow on the road. It was moving. It was rolling. Over and over the yellow tumbled in violence until it at last came to a stop. Inertia had now been spent, and all of the players now sat in their stillness upon the road. A second passes, then two?

Motion. He found himself outside his car. He was running towards the yellow twisted thing on the roadside, afraid now. Afraid, for he knew that within that torn, yellow vest there was a man, and he didn’t know if he was prepared to see what he was about to. Voices. Questions. Clarity. He holds the man’s legs as his another holds his head. The agonized fellow is still conscious and tries to thrash about in some attempt to alleviate his suffering. Nurses are there. Commuters like himself and witnesses to the horror, like himself. They are calm. They take command. They know what needs to be done. This is good for he is scared. He hears his heartbeat echoing thorough his ears like a church bell battered by a black squall. He holds fast as the writhing man finally calms. Shock setting in. Seconds pass.

Police. Lights. Sirens. Men with boxes and tools and very focused eyes are there. He stands now and walks back to his car, the others that had been with him at the beginning of this story doing the same.

Soon, his day in normal once more.

Loving, without expectation.