To Pity Pity for Four and Deem Dead

“How is one meant to pity pity?” Trua asked with a chuckle in her tone.

“For a stupid deal. Honestly. You should just pick a clock that doesn’t have the typo, or whatever. I mean it. It’s so weird.”

True held the clock up. Alan could imagine with her tilted head, scrunched nose, and contemplative face that she was picturing it on a wall somewhere, or stood on a mantle. Her smile was so lovely, more so than her creamish blonde hair or her pale blue eyes or the dresses she wore to make her twirls and jogs and sashaying more lively.

Yet now Alan wished she would frown, that some hint of apprehension should creep into a twist of her mouth or pull her brows together. 

Beginning with two, every other letter was bolded. A strange choice, by the designer. Stranger still was the fact that the number four was the only that broke the pattern.

Missing Four. Missing Si.

The meaning and lack of such made him uneasy. Alan was certain his mother and father would agree, but his Trua– his love and pity, she and her secular skeptics of a view would laugh, more so than when he insisted they don’t get that cheap fourth-floor apartment. Alan was certain still that now, a year later, he had saved their lives per his belief. 

America could not change evil and more than translation could change meanings. Even– Alan had convinced himself, without the deathly homophone in this language that Trua is so accustomed to. 

“Ah, it is  a strange work, that old clock. You know, it was Evelyn Caleb that made it, the only one she ever made a mistake on. I was her friend for a while, she gave it to me back in, eh, about… ah! It was back in eighty seven it must’a bee,” rattled the wizened and hunched stall tender, an old man whom to Alan seemed rather lunatic. 

Alan narrowed his eyes, squinting even more than his poor genes forced him to at the usual. 

“Evelyn Caleb!” Trua gaped, clutching the clock to her bosom. “Why, certainly not the Evelyn June Caleb that designed the Potter’s Juxtapose Paradox and made the numeral visual format, as per artists to apply?”

The old man then turned away cackling loudly for what to to Alan to have no cause. He turned away from him, spinning Trua around to whisper.

“Aw, Trua,” Alan began, attempting subtly to push the clock away from her, “You don’t believe this murmur of a tale.”

Trua snorted. “I don’t believe in ghosts or gods, or your weird thing with swimming pools and the number four. People’s words I do tend to believe.”

Alan lowered his voice, though not by much; figuring the old man was in fact too old to hear the offense or maybe hoping he would  hear and back off of Trua with his sale’s man incentive.

“The guy is probably senile, or will be in a jump skip and a hop of a month. He just wants your cash. He’s probably been eying up your gold bracelets since we walked in. I’d bet on it even.”

“Oh, you wouldn’t bet anything more than a penny on something you know for certain.”

Antagonistically, the old man cleared his throat in a disgusting, wet sounding manner.

With a side eye passionate enough to be noted, Alan returned his attention to him.

“You know, not enough people, ah, em, really appreciate my old friend’s work for the community of artists and sculptures, especially not from her original clockwork constructing days as a young woman. And she was a fine young woman, I'll say. A really nice figure she had too, it's a shame she never sculpted a self portrait,” the man declared, Trua and himself laughing at his crude sense of insultive humor.

“Oh, come on Trua, lets just g-”

“In fact, you know, in honour of dear Evelyn, I think I’ll hand this one off to you, free of cost.”

Anger boiling in his face, widening his eyes, steaming from his flared nostrils and streaming from his mouth, Alan shouted, “Now why! Why, on Earth! What do you even get out of this!”

The onlookers, of which were gathering, were what watered down his fire after moments more of tension followed by his Trua escorting him out of the stall, a bounce in her step as she carried the large clock.

And so it was that day that Evelyn Caleb, a crude elder, and his Pity defeated him. 

– – –

Driving back to their shared and small homes, Trua at the wheel humming along to the radio, Alan felt nothing but anxiousness. His noticing of himself biting at his cheeks and tapping his fingers or feet only allowed him to stop for a moment before switching to another nervous habit. His thoughts could only work so well at reassuring the rest of him, but still they tried.

It will be fine–

“No Trua, open your eyes!”

“Wait, wha–!”

“Stop, stop!”

The bridge’s railing creaked ominously against the weight of their car. Alan had failed to notice them straying off the path of the bridge. Trua has been humming, eyes closed, as though she were strolling in a garden rather than driving. Alan felt guilt and regret and fear, knowing first-hand her…discrepancies with following and meeting the requirements of road rules. After eight pants, Alan felt he had enough air to speak.

“Okay, um, I think we are fin–”

The rail broke. Trua, oh sweet Pity, her foot was still on the gas.

The car was falling. A thud, or rather, more of a splash. And they were no longer falling. No, now they weren't. Now they were in the clear, beautifully deadly waters. The doors were locked. Water was in their shoes at their feet. Alan screamed, Trua too, not thinking about oxygen preservation as they banged on the doors.

Up to their waists was the sloshing. 

How far sunk is the car? Alan questioned his memory, looking up in time to see a large crane stretching down to them, into the water. Hold, can cranes… I mean, can they even function in the water?

He turned to Trua, who was fiddling and tugging at the lock on the door, kicking it with a foot.

“Trua, they, I think they are going to get us! I thin–”

He gasped in a breath before the water took him under, pointing up.

Cheeks poofed out with the last of their oxygen, Alan and Trua gazed hopefully at the yellow crane, reaching for them, reaching to the car.

Alan’s short, dark hair was swept into his eyes by the water, so he had to push it back to see.

The crane hit the car then, not managing to grab them. Trua flung forward, head hitting the front of the car leaving a trail of red to dye the water.

“Trua! Trua! Trua!” Alan screamed through the water, bubbles leaving his mouth before he clamped it shut. He shook her, trying to wake her to no avail.

Some twenty seconds passed before the crane managed to touch them again, pulling the car up, and Trua was still gone from consciousness. Alan felt himself leaving too, in the dizziness as his body twitched, aching for breath.

It was so dark. He needed to breathe. Air. Air. Air. He tried to manifest it. Survive. Survive. Survive.

Then the darkness and the faintness was all he could see and feel, and everything was gone from his sight in the thick red water.

Si was not missing after all. Must have been his last thought. He was wrong.

– – –

He was in a hospital gown, in crisp hospital sheets, head set up a few inches by a stiff hospital pillow. Was he… asleep? Alan lifted his lids taking in the sight of the room. He was connected to at least two machines he thought, but he couldn’t be certain. He felt terribly faint, to a similar extent to right before he… right before he…. 

Trua was nowhere in his line of vision. The room wasn’t large. Where could she be?

Then, as though by the hands of a ghost his eyelids closed and a dreariness overcame him again. 

– – – 

Trua was dead. She had been dead for four days. Alan had been unconscious for four days.

“Whatd’ya mean? Trua? No, I mean. No. She isn’t. Trua doesn’t, well, she just can’t.” Alan looked for any excuse. Surely his Trua wasn’t really dead, it was a ploy. He hadn’t been in a coma. The blood she had lost hadn’t been too much. This was a ploy made in morbid jest. 

Surely si had not come for her. 

Yet it was her whom the clock was gifted to. Alan cursed himself, sat there in that stupidly clean hospital bed. He should have caught on to what was the worst piece of luck. They had been wished death by the old man with a clock which lacked it, and now it had come. Who but someone who wished the receivers time would soon be up would wish them away with a clock? 

“The car. Did it survive,” Alan asked robotically.

“Why, yes, yes it did,” replied the doctor, clearly relieved to have a more cheerful subject to switch to, “Umm, your mother took it to her house until you woke up. Well, we were all hoping you would, we weren’t certain though. At least you didn’t suffer any head trauma like Mrs. Trua Lantr–”

“Stop. Don’t speak of her.”

Alan worried that the man might have already called upon the ghost of his love and Pity by calling her name. The doctor ceased her speaking at once, knowing she had overstepped but wrong in her assumptions as to what. 

“I apolog–”

“There should be a clock. Every number was in a bold font, in an every other patter, after the letter two. All except for the number four. It was white. And large.”

“Yes, actually. Your mother left it here in the room for you. If you’ll just…” She spent a few seconds turned round, moving around heavy sounding things on the other side of a large dresser or table. 

“Just a bit waterlogged. Well, extremely waterlogged. But it still looks lovely!”

“Give it to me,” Alan requested and she did so. 

“When can I leave?” He droned the question, turning the clock over in his hands as Trua had done four days ago.

She responded cheerfully, “About a week. We will have plenty of boardgames and shows for you though, so I hope we won’t bore you too terribly!”

“Leave,” Alan said, setting the clock down carefully beside his dead as he felt sleep begin to overtake him once more. His breath slowed to the sound of her footsteps echoing in retreat. 

– – – 

As soon as his mother had come to pick him up in his car he had driven her to his house. He didn’t ever want anyone other than himself to drive whilst he was present. 

She had taken her shoes off and sat down in her chair to knit as though nothing was wrong with this world. 

Alan had said he was going on a walk. A partial truth. He did walk out the door and past the car and to the lake near his home, the lake with waters as clear as the ones which had set upon him his state of being missing from death. And he did all this while carrying the cursed clock, wondering if the news will cover his demise and how. 

Digging the toes of his shoes into the mud, Alan brandished the clock on that moonless night lit by the pollution of light and threw it into the lake.

– – –

The news didn’t try to cover it, but there were a few small papers known for their fanciful estimates that made an attempt. How do you address the story of a man drowned, lungs waterlogged on land, and the only other body being an old clock, every other letter bolded starting with two, sat entirely dry at the bottom of the lake. 

His mother grieved.

His doctor was aghast.

And, a stall a few miles, a hospital, and a bridge away, an old man was cackling and hackling with a disgustingly wet sound, interrupting his train of thought and speech with a customer to whom he was selling a broken mirror, the only one the famous Nyleve Enuj Belac ever made a mistake on.