Through the Clock Face… 2/2009

            And the clock winked… as she was staring at it distractedly, her thoughts a million miles away. It took a second for her to come to her senses and look at the old clock more closely. It was an old grandfather clock that probably was placed here when the library was first built. She was buried in the back of an old school library, in a comfy chair with her assigned book to read laying forgotten in her lap. She had took refuge in the old library because the snow was falling hard and fast, and she didn’t want to walk home to her apartment in this mess. Especially, when she would just be doing the same thing there, being bored.

          She started sinking back into her thoughts of how she wasn’t going where she wanted to be going in life. How things were all supposed to be exciting and new, but she had just seemed to have lost her creativity. Everything was gray and dull no matter how interesting it should have been to her.

          The clock winked again, or seemed to, but this time she wasn’t so far gone as to ignore it. She jumped up and crossed over to the small secluded corner where the clock stood tall in a corner against a shelf on one side and a frosted over window on the other. The clock was taller than her five foot stature so she had to stand on tiptoes to see into the cloudy face. The window must have had a draft and it was frosting the face over. It must have been light reflecting oddly off of it that she seen. So she took the end of her sleeve and wiped the front of the old glass face off. So she could actually see if it worked.

          As she cleaned the old clock’s face, she heard a faint click and the old door on the front that holds the pendulum was cracked open. ‘My jacket must have gotten caught,’ she thought. She was then interested enough to pull it slightly farther open and to look inside.

          It was extremely dark inside and had an old musty smell like an old book. Why it seemed so dark, she didn’t know. It was bright enough in this part of the library. She tentively put her hand into the darkness. It went in all the way to her elbow without feeling a back. ‘That’s strange,’ she thought, but her mind immediately went to old secret passages and exploring. She smiled for the first time in a while. ‘I should leave a note… Just in case.’ So she got out her notebook and left this message laying in the chair with her dull old book forgotten.

          “Gone into the clock, in search of lost creativity. Will return when can. Please leave bag here. Thanks”
She drew an arrow to the old clock and turned back to the clock, smiling. She winked back at the old clock, opened the small door, and crawled in…