Healing Machine for Chad
For the crippling fear of being too old to do the things you really, truly want to do.
You don’t know how long it's been since all the timepieces at the lake house stopped working. You just notice, one morning, an unusual spaciousness between the sound of the alarm and the snooze, as if you’ve been granted a brief stay of execution. You no longer hear the ticking of the clock in the living room, just an occasional beeping that distracts you from your work. At lunch, the ice cream turns to mint chocolate soup in the time it takes to get a spoon. You drink it pensively from the edge of the bowl, wondering what it all could mean, and more importantly, what Grammy is doing in the kitchen now that she’s not alive anymore.
“What,” she says, “I’m not even allowed in the kitchen?”
The beeping has started up again. Grammy fusses with the buttons on the microwave, jabbing them until they break and time ticks down, then up, then down again. You feel yourself growing older at an alarming rate, a rate that scares you. You jump out of your chair and go over to the counter to pull the plug on the stupid machine, but you’re too little to reach it now. You cry because you’re either too young or too old; what happened to all that time in between?
Grammy scoops you up onto the counter. You grab hold of the plug but you’re just a baby now, too small to get a proper grip on the thing.
“Here,” Grammy says, putting her hands over your little hands. You pull the cord together in a tug-of-war against the socket.
The terrible beeping stops. The microwave timer goes dark. You are exactly where you’re supposed to be.