BHS Inkwell 2017-2018

Berit Wilkins

cats’ eyes.The others gathered around and yelled and shoved him, until another took his own prized red marbles, and poured them into the noisy one’s messy black hair. Click click. Tick tock. Months passed.Then years. Humans came and went, from lawmakers to camera salesmen to university students with naive dreams of prominence and prosperity. Robberies happened. Squabbles broke out between irritated commuters over missed trains and tickets, only to be dejectedly directed to the squat ticket sales clerk with two missing front teeth. Once, a fire broke out in the storage cabin in the eastern corner of the town square.The great seething mass of 5 o’clock workers gathered and stared as the brilliant pink feathery dawn was obscured by the noxious black fumes emanating from the remains of the wooden building.The rest of the day was permeated with the sharp smell of acid, if one drew too near the charred black heap.The mass of humanity moved on. Elbows shoving fellow travelers aside, shouts and mutterings not to friends but to chauffeurs. A woman shot her companion one day. Just pulled a pistol and bang.The body fell, and the silken gloves with extraordinarily long fingers tucked the firearm away.This, the clock saw, and like the humans, it watched and did not react. It was

not until the blood stained a pair of expensive white shoes that a disgruntled man reported it. The world, the clock would have realized, if it could indeed realize anything, was a tumbling, chaotic mess of urgent yet trivial moments. When soldiers came into the square in crimson uniforms and plumed feathers to mow down a protesting group of university students with naive dreams of prominence and prosperity, the clock would have learned of war and government and freedom. When a child parted hands with her mother for far too long and then was dragged to disappear into the dark innards of a taxi, the clock would have learned of exploitation. And yet, when the clock watched a black- haired boy that had once held a head full of marbles walk to the open doors of of the station with a bouquet of feathery pink roses, the clock learned of love. Had the clock been able to think, over the next few weeks, it would have thought the world a somewhat paradoxical place. Humans took money from each other.They haggled over the small green strips of paper at the snack stand, they stole it from smaller, weaker fellow humans after delivering a few solid blows, but they also, for some strange reason, shared it with each other.The same could be said of

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