soft, winter music, and a quiet heart

The Half Killed

You are counting the days backwards. The clock on your bedside table is still, quiet, caught in time at 5:44. The black arms are spread out, and it looks like a spider is resting upon numbers. There is a crack running along the length of it, as if it had been hit by lightning.
Every autumn you catch a maple leaf before it hits the floor, place it under the clock, and watch the winter turn it to dust.

-oOo-

In class, they try to teach you about the past. They ask you what your first memory is, and you think about her. There is no colour, or sound, or feel to the picture. It is just her, as she was. The flighty gesture of slim hands. The nightingale eyes and lilting, morning voice. Her bony shoulders, and the way her knees were bruised, even if she always moved as if she were flying. You try to remember the feel of her cloudy, feather soul. Close your eyes and try to catch your breath when you can’t quiet recall all the details of her face. You are twins, and everybody says you look exactly alike.
But when you look into the mirror, you find no trace of her.

-oOo-

You know that forgetting is often harder than remembering, but there are some things you never want to let go of. Being seven, and curling up around each other under the same blanket as you watched Ghostbusters in the dark. The endless games of pretend as you used you mother’s old beside clock to catch the ghouls and poltergeists that haunted your world. Together, you would flutter from place to place, hunting air only your young minds could imagine take form. Two pairs of feet moving so quickly that you would seem like apparitions yourselves. The other children would ask to join, sometimes, and you would let them. But it was never the same. She was the only other person who lived in your strange, separate world, where death was just something that could be caught and stilled in borrowed clocks.

-oOo-

These days, your fingernails are always crusted with paint. You have been trying to draw what you can remember of her, but can only manage it in details. There is her voice; she used to hum when she cooked, and sing when taking a shower. Her voice would melt into liquid, half dipped in water, as if it were running with its ankles in the waves.
There were her fingers. You used to walk hand-in-hand, attached by skin and a thin earphone cable, from one’s ear to another’s. You could feel the bones of her as she tapped a rhythm against the back of your palm. Sometimes you will feel the music of its phantom limb and find yourself humming to ghosts.
Then, there is her face. When you paint, you always remember that night. She was sat on your bed, waiting to leave, and as you turned off the lamp the only light remaining was from a candle perched on the edge of the table. Its glow would not reach her and for a moment she seemed to fade away. But then she leaned over, tilted down, and as she reached to blow it out the gloom spilled shadows all over her face. For that second her face seemed to belong to an old photograph; black and white and faded. Your spine chills.
She looks like a ghost.
But then her breath blows the flame away, and the image disappears.

-oOo-

She has left pieces of herself behind, all over your life. Small roots beneath the surface, which you tip your head down to consume. You taste the dirt, and smell the way she used to love. Reminded, again, of how her elbows would move as she placed the flowers to dry between pages. The hobby she used to keep, outliving her in all your favourite words. Slowly, you become more afraid of reading, but now and then you will open a book and a pressed, fragile creature will flutter from the ink and unto the ground. Her glances were never this wrinkled, but some patches are just as soft.
You never miss her more than when offered these perfect reminders that she is gone.

-oOo-

The sea is roaring in your ears. All you can taste is salt. You cannot breathe. You are dead. No. Worse. You are half-killed.
She is dead.
There is liquid in your lungs. The glass on the church windows were stained, blue light filtering over your face. You have lived the past day, since the funeral, underwater. You cannot hold your breath any longer, but it is impossible to drown.
The clock on your bedside table is ticking. Its shape is painful. You try to remember when the last time you played with it was. Years ago, when you were both children, and the memories seem lost. Unreachable. You hold it in your hand, and the ticking is muffled, but it gets louder and louder with each movement.
You will be haunted, you realise, forever.
You do not know if you scream, or cry, or howl, but you are wild. You are broken, and there is now nothing left to replace you. The clock flies out of your hand, smashes the wall. Falls. Another fragile creature.
From inside, the ghosts escapes as time cracks and stops.