Mourning Joe And Other Short Stories

Mourning Joe

Joe died getting coffee.

Melissa was aware of the irony.

It was no great loss, really. Joe wasn't a nice man; she knew this even when she married him. And yet, wandering around their over-large house in a frayed pink shift and beaten bunny slippers, she felt a peculiar sense of loss. Not for Joe himself, who never tired of criticizing anything, least of all his wife of fifteen years, but for the wasted time she fed into him.

He didn't leave her much. Three golden retrievers, purebreds, one still a pup and one with a gray muzzle and only three legs. A big house that he'd purchased while making a killing as an art critic and which he'd allowed to fall into disrepair when his column fell out of favor. Enough money to get by (but not enough to repair the house). And, of course, his prized possession, a wall clock, designed by one of his now-dead art friends.

Melissa hated the clock almost as much as she hated Joe. It hung three-quarters of the way up the tallest wall in their home and was shaped like an owl. The wings were feathered in bronze and it flapped them and hooted mournfully every hour, big, amber eyes blinking, head rotating back and forth. At midnight, the head would spin all the way around.

There had been many nights when Joe would drunkenly insist all their dinner guests come watch the ugly, old bird reenact The Exorcist and many more where Melissa felt like breaking the bird over his stupid skull.

She could get rid of it now. Along with every other hideous painting in the place, but the once-valedictorian track star and prom queen, now unemployed, childless widow preferred to leave it there.

Sometimes she even called it 'Joe'.

One night, as she lay in bed with the dogs piled around her, she became aware of a ticking noise.

It was very soft at first, so soft she thought it might be nothing but a product of the imagination, but it persisted, getting louder and louder, until she fancied she could feel it in her teeth.

When it became too loud to bear, she tossed back the covers and sought the source.

She was unsurprised to find that it was the clock, although it was two full floors below the bedroom and she had never noticed the ticking before.

Yet, now it was thunderous, the sound vibrating her very skeleton. She could bear it no longer and so, she went to the old shed out back and retrieved Joe's rickety old work ladder, which she mounted beneath the clock and proceeded to scale.

The dogs watched all of this with the sort of attentive gaze only dogs can. When she reached the top of the ladder, the eldest, Sadie, voiced an unhappy woof and stood, but Melissa, a headache splitting her skull, hushed her impatiently and waved her away.

The dog whined and hobbled towards the couch.

Melissa seized the wretched clock and wrenched it from the wall. To think this was where her life had ended up, graduating first in her class with great prospects, only to end up hitching her wagon to a broken-down mule. If she could do it again...

The clock was heavy and cumbersome, the cold metal biting her hands. She got it turned around and found the switch. There was a unique sort of satisfaction that came with turning it off, silencing it forever. She hung it back on the wall and started down the ladder, when from the corner of her eye, she noticed a peculiar thing; Sadie hovered between the floor and the couch, mid-leap.

Melissa looked from the dog to the clock, then to the dog again, then wrestled the clock from the wall and restarted it.

Sadie landed on the couch and barked again.

That was...

Well...

What was the word?

Melissa took the clock down and tried again, this time winding back the hands before restarting it.

Then she stood frozen on the ladder, watching another version of herself stalk into the room, wild-eyed and vengeful with all three dogs in tow.

Impossible.

She wound it back further.

Now she saw Joe, square-jawed and drunk with silver streaks in his hair, slurring his words as he led a group of equally drunk men into the living room, boisterously declaring that they simply must see his clock.

She wound it further still.

And they were arguing in the living room.

And further and further and further.

They were touring the home with a realtor.

And further and further until her hands ached.

She was tall and sleek in an evening gown, at a party someplace, laughing with a group of adoring men.

And further.

Until she was back in high school, accepting her plastic tiara and smiling for a flashing camera.

She kept winding back and forth, savoring the past in its glory.

Finally, when she had enough (for now) she turned the hands back to their appropriate time. She was back on the ladder in the decrepit living room with the dogs looking up at her. She lifted the clock to mount it back upon the wall.

It hooted, eyes blinking, wings flapping, head spinning all the way around.

She started. The ladder swayed and the clock slipped from her hands as they both plummeted to the hardwood floor.

The clock hit first and burst into a thousand glittering pieces, wings still weakly lifting and falling, warbling a guttural cry.

Melissa wasn't far behind.