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On the twelfth chime of the clock, there was silence.
Richard Dunham did not see the world as we see it, a movie made by a shaky cameraman that told the mundane story of our lives. He saw it as a series of photographs, of intoxicating smells, of time-halting moments, of glorious whirlwinds of colour.
Dunham was no aficionado of cinema, nor did he hold any particular fondness for leisurely strolls, but at this moment in time, he was engaged in both.
The city streets were wide, spacious, the kind of streets you would expect parades to be held in for some magnanimous presence, or perhaps a lavish party thrown by a high-end stock broker in his three-bedroom apartment down the block’s end.
A dazzlingly beautiful woman clung to his arm, meticulously manicured nails digging into his skin; she was one of the many he had been with, yet at least this once, he knew her name.
The regal clock tower – 13th century, was it? – spearing into the sky chimed twelve times, no more. The elongated black finger cast by the imperious structure consumed them momentarily, casting them in a dense rectangle of twilight.
There were few things he remembered from that day, what he did recall was irrelevant. The chattering of some high-school girls; the mint gum chewed by a leather-clad, moustachioed brute; a young couple, hands clasped tightly, peeking in through a jewellery shop window; two crinkled old men waiting for a bus, their croaking guffaws spouting from toothless mouths.
On the twelfth chime, Richard Dunham laid down his pencil, stretching his cramped hand, certain he had at least passed this exam.
On the twelfth chime, Richard Dunham, bright-eyed and bursting with anticipation, sped into the darkness of his parent’s room and leapt onto their bed, honey-blonde hair flying about his face, shouting about Santa Claus, reindeer and god knows what else.
Although the people on that wide street were strangers, their minds were open to him; pasts, sordid, jaw-dropping and mournful, spilling out onto the road, into the gutters, knocking over trash bins on their way, a cacophony of sights, sounds and experiences. The entire road was consumed by the tidal wave of time.
There, the high-schoolers grew up, moved to new cities, and forgot their friendships with one another ever existed; here, the leather-clad man bullied at school, his pot belly splattered with mud, others circled around him, chanting the same childish rhyme over and over; over there, the couple, now grey-haired and senile, sitting with their children, and their children’s children. Last of all, lest we forget, the aged veterans, fighting together in a war with no name, now leaving the bench empty – a fleeting memory, or mere imagination?
A tinkle, a spinning coin on the pavement. Marbles knocked across the board, which in reality was a chalk-marked circle, the younglings sitting amongst the concrete and the mass of feet swirling around them, Moses parting the Red Sea.
