.III.

How long have I been waiting? Time gets expanded when you are waiting on it to pass. June sat in the quiet house next to the front window. She held as still as she could so her wooden chair wouldn’t creak and break the silence. It’s a frightful thing to break a perfect silence, and June felt this. And tonight was one of those silences. It was sometime in the very early morning, when all the crickets and frogs and cicadas had gone to sleep, and even the wind had stilled. Half of a moon lit the sky blue in an opening in the trees outside the window, and pale light fell through the window onto the wood floor at June’s feet. Quietly, June waited in the darkness. She watched patiently out the window, sometimes counting down from ten in her mind, sometimes searching the sky for a hint of morning.

So much of life is like this. Life is a watched pot that just won’t boil. It’s an interminable night with a morning that just won’t come. It’s the dark figure of a loved one that just won’t appear around the bend.

The clock on the mantle had stopped at some point earlier that night. When you wait for time to pass and you speed it with your will, it resists--or so it seems. It slows until it only creeps along, and then it stops altogether. The ticking clock had measured seconds in with a solid acoustic click that gave the room a heartbeat. It marked the seconds that June waited out by the window, and when the seconds slowed she pushed them with her mind, but the harder she pushed the slower they become. Then they stopped, and the blue night looked to stretch on limitlessly.

June wondered what she ought to do. What was there to do? She looked around the small room—a stove, a table, a rifle standing in the corner, a basket of yarn by a chair. She glanced back out the window. Maybe the sky looked a little lighter…was that a movement behind that oak tree? No. The sky was just as dark, and still nobody appeared around the bend.

She thought of the amber marble. Where was it? In the bag, probably. June lifted herself out of the chair which creaked terribly at the movement. She felt stiff and numb from her waist down to her feet. Shuffling into the adjoining room, she lifted her bag from the floor onto the bed. In a bottom corner of the bag she found the marble, and closing her hand on it, she made her way back to the window. The chair moaned again as she sat down on it again. Holding the marble up in front of the moon, it shone clear and clean as a glass of iced tea.

Somehow, at that moment, everything changed again. The clock didn’t start again, but she felt time take a step forward. She could feel seconds ticking away again. I got it all right here; right here in my hand. She didn’t need to wait for Isaiah and Caleb anymore. June had that marble; she held perfection in her hand, and she lacked nothing.