The Long Afternoon
Afternoons were the hardest hours. They stretched longer than mornings, heavier than evenings. The boy always felt the air thick with a kind of waiting, as if even the walls of the house were holding their breath for something that never arrived.
He would wander from room to room, barefoot, dragging his fingertips along the plaster, listening to the creak of old floorboards under his weight. The house answered him with groans and sighs, as though it remembered every step taken before his.
The heat of summer pressed against the windows, thick and shimmering. His grandmother would pull the curtains half-shut, muttering about the sun bleaching the furniture. But he liked it.....the way the light bled through the fabric, turning the whole room a dusty gold. When he closed his eyes in that glow, it felt as though he were floating inside a giant, slow-beating heart.
Most afternoons, his grandmother napped in her chair. Her knitting slid into her lap, needles tilted like small, crossed swords. Her chest rose and fell with shallow rhythm, sometimes catching in her throat as though she were swallowing a stone in her sleep.
The boy sat on the floor nearby, afraid to wake her. He studied the way her eyelids twitched, her lips moving faintly, whispering words he couldn't hear. Was she talking to someone inside her dream? Perhaps to the girl she once had been.
He leaned forward once, close enough to hear the soft hum in her throat. It sounded almost like singing, a lullaby without words.
The clock's tick filled the room around her. The boy thought it must be measuring her breaths, one after another, as though making sure she didn't lose her way.
When he grew restless, he turned to the desk again. The pocket watch waited for him in the drawer, cold and silver, cracked across the face. He always thought it looked wounded, like something that had been dropped from great height.
He cupped it in both hands and listened. The tick was sharp, urgent, private. Unlike the heavy kitchen clock, this one seemed alive.....breathing against his palms.
Once, in a whisper, he asked it, "Where are you going?"
Of course, it never answered. But the tick seemed to grow louder, as if mocking him. The boy pressed it to his ear, closing his eyes, pretending that if he listened hard enough, it would tell him where all those seconds ran off to, and why none of them ever came back.
Some afternoons, when the house grew unbearable, he escaped into the field. The tall grass leaned heavy with heat, the air buzzing with crickets and flies. His shirt clung to his skin, and the earth beneath his feet was hot enough to sting.
But he loved it. Out there, the world seemed bigger, freer. The field bent and swayed like an ocean, and he imagined himself a small boat, drifting.
At the far end, the oak tree waited. Always the oak. Its branches spread like arms, casting shade wide enough to swallow him whole. The bark was rough, scarred, lined with names that blurred together. Some fresh, some faded into the skin of the tree like old wounds healed over.
He pressed his cheek against the trunk, closing his eyes. It was cool, steady, older than everyone he knew. He whispered to it sometimes, secrets he didn't share with anyone else. And though it never answered, he liked to believe it listened.
Once, as the sun dipped low, he heard his father's voice calling from the yard. "Come in before it gets dark!"
But the boy stayed a little longer, pressing his small hand flat against the trunk, as if by doing so he could feel its slow heart beating deep inside. He thought maybe the tree had its own kind of time.....not like clocks or watches, but something wider, more patient, measured in leaves and seasons.
That evening, over dinner, his father seemed distracted. He pushed food around his plate, eyes clouded, as though he had walked far that day, farther than the field, farther than the town.
The boy watched him in silence. He wanted to ask: What do you think about when you look like that? But he didn't dare.
Instead, he asked, "Did you carve your name in the oak?"
His father blinked, startled, then nodded slowly. "Long ago."
"Why?"
"To say I was there."
The boy considered this, chewing his bread carefully. To say I was there. Was that what people wanted? Proof they had stood in a certain place, that the world had held them for a moment? He imagined the tree filled with hundreds of names, hundreds of voices whispering together: I was here, I was here, I was here.
Later that night, lying in bed, he thought about carving his own name. But then a darker thought came.....what if the tree one day fell? Would his name fall with it, and vanish?
Rain came the next day. Heavy drops smacked against the roof, turning the dirt outside into mud. The boy pressed his face to the window, watching the world dissolve into water. The clock ticked behind him, steady, but outside everything seemed to melt and slide.
His grandmother sat in her chair, knitting again. The rhythm of her needles matched the tick of the clock, stitch by stitch, second by second.
She said, without looking up, "When I was your age, I thought afternoons lasted forever."
The boy turned. "And now?"
"Now they pass like a sigh." She tied off a knot, lifted the wool close to her face to examine it. Her hands shook, the skin thin and veined. "That's what time does. It tricks you. When you want it to hurry, it drags. When you beg it to stay, it runs."
The boy frowned. He wanted to argue, but didn't know how. He thought of the dust in the sunlight, the dragonflies in the field, the silence of the oak tree. To him, time still seemed endless.
But a small part of him, buried deep, wondered if she was right.
That night, he dreamed of the pocket watch. Only it wasn't broken anymore. The glass face was smooth, the silver gleaming as if newly made. He opened it, and instead of gears, he saw a tiny landscape inside: a road, stretching far into the distance, lined with trees. A man was walking along it, tall, his back straight, never once turning around.
The boy called after him, but the man didn't answer. The tick of the watch echoed louder, louder, until the road itself began to crumble underfoot.
He woke sweating, the sound of the kitchen clock beating in his ears. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock. As if reminding him he had only dreamed. As if mocking him again.
The next morning, the dust swam golden in the light once more, as though nothing had changed. But the boy stared at it differently. He thought of shadows, of dreams waiting to be born, of names carved in bark, of men walking away down endless roads.
For the first time, he felt a small, sharp ache in his chest, though he could not name it. He only knew that the dust would fall, the shadows would lengthen, the watch would keep ticking, and the tree would one day stand without him.
The hours of childhood still moved slow, but now he had glimpsed their fragility.