Hands Of Time [Chapter 11]

When I reached the front door I found it locked. My wife probably locked it trying to protect the children. I started groping in my coat pockets, in search for my house keys, when all of a sudden the front door swung open revealing the face of my wife. I felt my knees begin to shake as she looked at me with a peaceful smile, followed by a hearty laugh and the question of how could I have misplaced my keys from my car up to the house? I wanted to turn away from her, running and screaming into the dark night but instead I quickly calmed myself, laughed along with her and shrugged my shoulders indecisively. As I came into the house I noticed that I had my coat on, but how could that be, I had taken it off before dinner over an hour ago? My lips met with my wife’s and then I faked a smiled at her as I began to take off my coat. It was at this moment that I noticed that I no longer had the wire binding me to our clock. “Now, how did that get off” I asked myself silently? I felt my head begin to swim in confusion, my stomach was turning, why was I reliving all of this again, why was I caught in this rerun of events? Was I losing my mind or was all of this but a demented dream? As these thoughts filled my mind I saw my wife’s mouth open to speak to me. Before a single word exited her lips I already knew exactly what she was going to say. When the words came out of her mouth I had to keep my own from flopping open in bewilderment. According to some unannounced cue my eyes automatically turned to look into old grandfather clocks’ face and I noted that it was for the second time this day, 5:26 p.m. This no longer surprised me; maybe I was starting to nicely adjust to my new condition of insanity. Crazy or not I played my part, like a true actor, and told her I couldn’t remember why I was late and didn’t know where I had been. I again spoke my lines, with repetitive accuracy, asking for a few minutes to try and recall my whereabouts for the last hour. Even though this time I really did have an answer to this question. My wife looked deep into my eyes, smiled sweetly at me and then turned her face towards the house’s bedrooms and called the children to the dinner table. My children were not cowering under their beds in terror but were laughing without a fear before me at our dinner table and didn’t seem to have a care in the world. Not a mention of the events that went on previously, just hearty laughing, loud talking, and sloppy eating, like all earlier events of the evening had been erased from their memory banks. This time supper went by without a peep of a siren; there wasn’t any loud noises, any van, soldiers or any of the earlier events that interrupted our dinner. As the last of the children excused themselves from the table I heard the sound of the grandfather clock. He was announcing to all within hearing distance that it was now six o’clock. As the last bong of the clock faded into the annuls of history, I strained my ears, trying to detect the slightest noise coming from above. All of my most intense concentration could not generate the sound that I had earlier heard from the attic immediately following the sixth bong from the clock. As the children played in their rooms and my wife worked on one of her fancy art crafts, I sat at the supper table trying to understand what had happened earlier on. Was it a dream, was I losing my mind, I really didn’t know? I strolled over to the front window and looked outside, all that was there was my car, nothing else, no van. I felt my body begins to relax, it must have all been some hallucination or bad dream or who knows what.