07/10/2025 | tate-abrahamson | #from_air

My clock is broken. It has five purple petals and a face. It rests on my bookshelf, next to my dollhouse. The house is made of cardboard. It dips where feet rest and molds itself to furniture. Above my clock, sunlight streams in. When it hits the wall behind me, I know that it’s 4 PM. When it hits my apple-shaped clock, I know that it is 6 PM. Unlike my flower clock, the apple does work. But the cord doesn’t reach the outlet and I’ve found that the glare that radiates from it at 6 PM does a better job of telling me it's 6 PM than a ticking hand does. I want a clock that is shaped like a cat, with shifting eyes and a swinging tail. Ideally, it would look like my cat, who lies on my bed, and is scared of thunder. But I don’t have this clock and I have yet to find one that looks like my cat who is now hiding under my bed - because she is scared of thunder. So, I made one out of hooks and papier-mâché and placed it in my dollhouse. Of course, it doesn’t work, but when I start to sob, my doll knows it's 11 PM and when my cat hides under my bed, she knows it's thundering. My doll thinks it’s silly that her house is made of cherry wood, while mine is made of cardboard. She thinks this is why I sob at 11 PM and why I shield my eyes at 6 PM.

If I could look into her porcelain head it would probably look something like this: there would be a millipede, with a cigar, reading a newspaper, talking to a beetle, sweeping the floor with a broom, made of fallen eyelashes, that have collected behind the marble eyeballs. The millipede would state that cardboard does not hold up furniture properly and that the constant state of impending doom is what terrorizes my every thought. The beetle would reply that surely, cardboard does not insulate sound well, and my cat would be less afraid of thunder if it didn’t sound like we were inside it. This millipede and this beetle would bear striking resemblance to my father and mother, who, ironically, raised me in a cardboard house of their own. And I am quite certain there IS a millipede and a beetle inside my dolls head, regardless of if they smoke cigars or collect missing eyelashes, because I have seen both a millipede AND a beetle in my room before. I only stopped seeing them climb my cardboard walls after my doll’s brief stint as a one-eyed wonder (the eye had rolled under my bed and I found it when I went to retrieve my cat after a particularly bad storm).

And before you, too, start to judge me and my home, just know that the bugs that control my doll are wrong. I like the way the cardboard bends when I get into bed at night. And I don’t mind the mold that creeps up after each rain. Put simply, I have complete trust in my unorthodox home. My cat does too, though there’s an ever-widening hole in the corner, where she uses it as a scratching post. I don’t doubt that this is where the bugs crawled in.

Above my bed I have a watch hung like a dream catcher. It eats the time so that I sleep longer. Across the wall, I have a second watch. It is imperative that neither of these watches work, so as to create a portal between the two. I have heard of this phenomenon with mirrors: if you face them towards each other it creates a portal to a different plane. So, being the scientific being that I am, I was determined to test my own theory. If mirrors reflect place and the portal created by mirrors generates an otherwise unreachable place, then watches and clocks must do the same with time. Are you following? Well, say this watch reflects back to me the time of day, as abstractly as the mirror does my face. I believe it's 3 PM because the clock tells me it is. And the clock believes it's 3 PM because I set the time long ago. Just as the mirror believes that the halloween mask on my face is my face, because I have told it so. So, when my broken watch looks across my room at my other broken watch, they infinitely reflect abstract time back to each other. It is important to me that for this time portal I use watches, rather than clocks, because the effect is much smaller and causes less accidents. (I did first try this with clocks, but found myself rushing through it far too often, and the hair that I had just done was miraculously undone, and the pimple I had finally got rid of was back in full force).

The watches’ tiny faces whisper memories to me. I like listening to their chants as I fall asleep. Sometimes they recall embarrassing moments from my past, which causes me to toss and turn all night. This isn’t a problem, so long as it's storming and my cat is under my bed, otherwise she gets annoyed with the constant movement and lashes out by scaling my cardboard walls. Which is why there are tiny punctures and scratches behind my bed.

I’m not mad at her for this. The moonlight streams in through these tiny holes and creates stars in my room. Depending on their height in my bedroom-sky, I can tell what time it is. When it hits high on the wall in front of me, I know it's 4 AM.