The window is open tonight, the breezeless evening sighing in the silence of the moon.
Another sleepless sheep wanders the pastures beyond the glass pane, grazing on grass that cries in the fond memory of golden sunlight dew. Occasionally the sheep stops to inspect the odd flower protruding from the greens, but she steps past when she realizes that is not a camellia, but rather a common ragwort. The flower is not yellow in the twilight shade, but gray. Gray and dull.
One day it will wilt.
The sheep pauses, lifting her head to turn an inquiring eye towards the window. The single window in her world, ever-present, glossy and afloat.
Do you not sleep? A voice. It is curious, it is reprimanding. It is the sheep’s surfacing worries wrapped in a gift box, drowned at sea. The voice is melodious, though it whispers with the volume of a long-broken radio.
From the window, the voice seems to await an answer, but you must be mistaken. Sheep do not speak, nor do they respond to ghostly queries under the stars. Unbothered, the animal resumes her amble, pretending as though the window is but another fragment of the broken sky.
Upon the window sill sits a clock— a clock that watches intensely as the sheep explores. The night is long, and if forever means a boundless ticking arm, then they have eternity to spend with one another.
Unknowing in each other’s presences, yet aware.
It is interesting to note that the clock is a peculiar one. It watches the sheep with eyes that are placed beneath the soles of its batteries, and blinks with lashes that remind you of the soft pattern in rain. A beautiful lady resides within this particular clock, bound to its face by fate. She contorts her body as the hours pass, her legs the minutes, her arms the seconds. Perhaps it is her, slim figured and clothed in white rags, who speaks to the sheep. But who knows? Clocks don’t talk, nor do they question sheep in the waning light. And ladies who reside in such clocks certainly do not converse into the dark, either.
As the hour strikes, the woman twists. Her hands, skinless but pristine, unfold to cast shadows upon the grass. The shape of an animal. Horned and wooly, torn and unborn. It is nearing sunrise, her body shows. The clock rings, alarming the performer, and the sheep halts to peer into the cloudy window.
Look, my dear. A reflection of your figure in the pasture. How fascinating, do you not agree?
The sheep does not hear, for the voice was buried years ago. The sheep does not look, for shadows are hardly visible in the cold night. Even when morning is near.
So the woman retracts her hands, curling into a ball upon the clock’s surface. She slumbers, while time freezes.
They face one another with eyeless stares, loving with hearts that see naught in the dark.
But if forever means tonight, they have eternity together. I just don’t know when eternity shatters.
