"For example, Aunt Crystal," I noted aloud. "She died young, had little ones--I'd call it an unfortunate demise, even... a surprise demise." I grinned at the unexpected poetry. "But never untimely. Do you," I said, "remember Aunt Crystal, or were you too young?"
The portly gray-suited man in my living room said nothing. He continued to stare around my house, squinting, pretending to listen.
"Everything has a place and a time," I prattled on, pretending his silence didn't hurt, pretending he wasn't being rude. "I'm sure you agree. Just the other day I told Advance, I said, wasn't Crystal's death timely?"
This time he nodded. He was frowning at my kitchen window, running a finger down the length of the sill, and now as I paused in my soliloquy, he tsked at it.
The gesture was too rude to ignore, but too disrespectful to acknowledge. "Ahh, like my new curtains, do you?" I simpered. "The purple velvet isn't too much, is it? And I rather love the gold flowers myself. Pull those beauties back on a summer midnight and look through that window, and you're sure to see our unicorn graze on the sagebrush."
To this proclamation the man deigned to answer out the side of his mouth with an insincere, uninterested, "Mmm, I see," and pulled a dull wood-framed pocket watch from his suit jacket."Tight schedule," I observed bitterly. "I see how it is. No one has got time for their elders anymore."
He peered into my face for a long, careful moment. "You're wrong," he said, looking away with some relief. He closed his pocketwatch with a punctual shnick. "I should jolly well think so, anyway. This didn't take long."
"Oh? Then you're staying?" A note of hope in my voice.
"Rightly so. This house could fall down any second now, any fool on the street could see that," he said.
I blinked.
"Look, I'm sorry about the unicorn comment," I told him. "She never meant to bite you. You're too old to ride on her back, now, but... They say, in the Dreaming, anything is possible. You could... you and I could... What are you doing?"
He drew out a clipboard, made a few marks, and stabbed a few disapproving glares at my fabulous, intricate decor.
"Yes," he continued, as though he hadn't heard me. "Condemned. The council won't argue. Neither, I think, will the neighbors." He put the clipboard away and dusted his suit jacket.
"You miss this place... Don't you? Even a little?" I begged. "I miss you, you know. You're the reason I stayed here."
He sighed. There wasn't even enough passion in his voice to mistake for anger, or for pain, or for any kind of imagination or hope. "I kind of wondered," he said vaguely. "I kind of thought... But whatever was here when I was a kid is gone."
"I'm not gone! I'm here!" I shouted, fearful he wouldn't listen, fearful he'd end it all.
He looked at me. "After all this time," he said. "You're just a timepiece."
My heart broke. My essence would soon follow.
"You can't even keep the right time," he reproached, and, dusting off his pressed pants, he left.
- A response to Prompt 2
