The Watchmaker

by Anna Tambour

 

The watchmaker's mother puttered round him. His father had almost destroyed him, but drifted away.

Under the pretext of putting them somewhere, the watchmaker's mother played with his tools.

The watchmaker's digits flickered constantly. They flashed too fast for even his mother to see, but she could feel the effect.

A snatch of time here, another there. Each piece, he used.

This watch will have seventeen.

Not many pieces later, he finished that watch, and before his mother could stop him (as if she ever could) he tossed that, too.

Now there were almost more watches made and tossed than there was, time.

The watchmaker, who had made the first watch and snatched time first, now crowded space, space that was nothing before he filled it.

His mother felt something crowding her. Something without a name.

The watchmaker looked at his mother and saw, almost a nothingness.

The watches he made, the chased designs he dug into their backs, had shined as shards of light, once.

He felt a hole inside himself. It pulled so that his outer parts were pinched.

Watches had not filled the hole.

Light itself had dulled.

Time had made no change.

The watchmaker reached out to his mother. He touched a breast.

He wrapped himself around her, and with his mighty strength, he made of her, more of a nothingness than ever she was before.

And that did nothing to fill his hole.

He found his father.

His father was weak, though he left behind an even greater nothing.

And in the great void now filled with emptiness, the watchmaker felt a something new. He called it Pain, though there was no-one to tell this to.

The watchmaker roared, but only nothing heard him.

Watches have no ears.

The watchmaker who now made no more watches, slept.

And when he woke, a mist rose from his hole, and the now ex-watchmaker breathed it in. It smelt, deeply, of emptiness.

He slept again, but woke to Pain.

The ex-watchmaker put his digits to his hole. And they flew out stinking and without form. The hole flashed, burning with a mighty light. He turned himself every way, but the flaming hole consumed him.

His hole inside had grown so great, it was almost the whole of him.

The ex-watchmaker was beside himself.

He cursed, and then he spoke:

"Let us make something in our image," he said, and let me see . . .