The Dust in the Sunlight
The boy did not yet know the word time. Not in the way grown people meant it, with their calendars and clocks, their years and anniversaries. To him, the word meant only the soft stretch of mornings when the sun slanted through the cracked window and made tiny golden rivers in the air.
He liked to sit on the wooden floorboards with his knees tucked tight against his chest, staring into those rivers of dust. They moved so slowly it hurt his eyes. Some glided upward, others fell, twisting and shimmering. They seemed alive, like tiny creatures swimming toward something he could not see.
Sometimes he reached out his hand to catch them, but they slipped through his fingers. The dust never stayed.
The house was small but endless. Long corridors stretched further than they should have, dark and cool even when the day outside was hot. Doors stood half-open, some leading to rooms full of quiet, others to rooms so cluttered with forgotten objects they felt like little museums. The boy wandered them all, as if mapping a secret world.
And always, from the kitchen, came the sound of the clock.
It was an old thing, round, its frame dull with scratches, its face the yellow of tired cream. The tick it made was sharp and deep, as though each second were being nailed to the wall. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.
The boy listened to it like other children listened to music. Sometimes he thought it was fast, leaping forward like a rabbit across grass. Other times, when he was waiting for his father to come home, it dragged like an old man's footsteps. The sound changed with his heart.
One day, when he was tired of staring at the dust, he asked his grandmother, "Why does it make that noise?"
She was shelling peas at the table, her fingers bent and swollen, moving slower than they once had. Without looking up, she said, "That's time walking, child."
He frowned. "Walking where?"
"Forward," she answered. Then she paused, her hands still, her eyes lost in something far away. When she spoke again, her voice was softer, almost cracked. "Always forward. Never back."
The boy did not understand her sadness. He only thought about a tall man with long legs striding into the distance, never turning around, never waiting for anyone who lagged behind.
His father's desk sat in a corner of the hallway, dark oak, the drawers heavy to pull. The bottom one always stuck, but the boy had found a way to open it by jiggling it sideways. Inside lay a silver pocket watch, its glass face cracked like a spider's web.
His father had told him never to touch it, but he did, always. He would lift it carefully in both hands, pressing the cool metal against his cheek. The tick inside was faster than the kitchen clock, urgent, like a heart racing after running.
If he held it close enough, shutting out every other sound, he could imagine he was small enough to step inside. He pictured himself walking along shining gears the size of mountains, bridges of brass turning under his feet, rivers of oil glinting in lamplight. Somewhere inside, he was sure, there would be a door. A door to yesterday, or tomorrow.
He never found it, of course. But the dream clung to him.
"Grandma," he once asked, when the two of them sat by the fire, "what is yesterday?"
She laughed softly, though not unkindly. "Yesterday is the shadow of today."
"And tomorrow?"
"A dream waiting to be born."
Her answers unsettled him. Shadows vanished when the light shifted, and dreams slipped through your fingers as soon as you woke. How could things so thin, so unreliable, hold the whole world together?
Beyond the house, the yard tumbled into a field of grass that grew tall enough each summer to swallow him whole. He liked to wade through it, his arms stretched out as though swimming, dragonflies buzzing close to his ears with the sound of tiny engines.
He sometimes caught one, holding it carefully between his cupped palms. He would feel its body thrumming, delicate as a secret, before guilt made him open his hands and watch it streak away into the bright air.
At the far edge of the field stood an oak tree, its trunk scarred with carvings. Some were letters, some only shapes, some so faded they had turned to shadows on bark. His father told him the carvings had been there since he was a boy.
The boy pressed his fingers into the grooves, tracing the shapes he couldn't yet read. They felt like voices trapped in wood, calling from years he had missed.
"Will I be here too?" he asked one afternoon, squinting at the bark.
His father had smiled in that distracted way adults often do with children, a smile that promised nothing. "Maybe. If the tree lasts."
If the tree lasts. The words stayed with him like a stone in his pocket. He had thought trees were forever. Now he wasn't sure.
Evenings brought stillness. His grandmother sat on the porch with her knitting needles flashing like tiny silver swords, her lips moving as though she were praying or arguing with herself. He sat beside her, swinging his legs, listening to the frogs in the ditches sing their clumsy songs.
Sometimes she told stories....not fairy tales, but memories. She spoke of hunger, of war, of a time when the house had been full of brothers and sisters, voices layered one over another like threads in a cloth. The boy listened, trying to picture her small, with dark hair and quick hands. He couldn't. To him she had always been old, as if she had been born with wrinkles and soft, thinning voice.
But when she spoke, the world cracked open. He felt dizzy with the knowledge that she had once been a child like him, and that he would one day sit where she sat, with thin hands and too many shadows in his eyes.
Nights were heavier. Shadows lengthened, the clock's tick grew louder, and sometimes he woke in the dark with the certainty that the world had stopped. He would hold his breath, waiting, waiting....until the tick came again, and the relief cut sharp as pain.
Once, creeping through the hallway, he found his father sitting at the table. The silver watch was open in his palm, the crack across its face catching the lamplight. His father's lips moved soundlessly, as though he were speaking into the watch itself.
The boy stayed hidden, his small body pressed against the wall. He knew.....without knowing how...that it wasn't the watch his father spoke to, but someone else, far away. Someone who lived only in yesterday.
The boy crept back to bed with a heavy heart, carrying a new and frightening knowledge: that time did not only move forward. It could also wound, leave holes, and make even strong men sit alone in the dark, whispering to ghosts.
And so his childhood stretched, not in birthdays or calendars, but in little things: in dust swimming through golden light, in the slow deep sighs of his grandmother, in the trembling of dragonflies between his fingers, in the rough bark of the oak tree, in the secret conversations his father had with a broken watch.
The boy still did not understand the word time. But he had begun to feel it, a second pulse beneath his skin, quiet and unstoppable, like the steady drip of water hollowing out stone.