A short story I recently turned in for my fiction class. Still revising, but let me know what you think (don't mind the formatting errors from copying and pasting).
The Young Man with Wrinkled Hands
His feet fell heavy and lethargic like a pair of cigarette butts smothering themselves on the pavement. They led him as autonomous beings, familiar with each crack in the sidewalk like a lover’s hand, knew when to turn, when to stop, when—occasionally—to hesitate, and when to continue forward. They knew the smells of the afternoon street vendors—steam from the bratwurst, spicy mustard seed, sweat from the stained t-shirt of the Indian merchant on 47th. They knew the scent of passing feet—the sterile, tactile leather from the businessmen’s Rockport dress shoes; the cheap perfume soaked into high heels from party girls, dancers and whores; the earthy, musty odor from the poor’s dirty, torn tennishoes. They even knew the smells of the weather—the way the sun tastes like copper on their tongues; the bitter tug of the wind; the earthy, lingering nostalgia of rain. Everything in its place.
When he looked up, the clouds seemed to sag toward the earth, as if to say, I want to taste soil. The buildings responded by stretching skyward, saying, I want to taste air devoid of gravity. His feet, the man, and his thoughts stopped at the building with the sign reading TIME SHOPPE and walked in.
…
In his bedroom that morning, he had awoken from a dream that his face and hands turned into those of a clock. They transformed from flesh, bone, blood, ligaments to plastic, glass, metal, cogs. He felt the ticking in his ears. He believed it to be real.
The characters 1, 1, 4, 9 jeered at him through red teeth on the table side. He thought, She would never mock me like they do, and got out of bed. On his kitchen table sat an opened package of generic cookies, a bowl of stale fruit, three rent statements, and an eviction warning. He ate a cookie, looked at the neat, typed letter from his landlord and thought, She would let me stay at her place. This was when he slipped into his shoes and headed out the door.
…
“Hello, Mr. Martin,” the shopkeeper said.
“Hello,” he said.
The shopkeeper—Gordon Kingsley, a man in his late forties—was one accustomed to a lot of manners, often wore sweaters slightly too large for his frame with a pair of thin-rimmed glasses sitting on his nose, a rigid posture, slender hands, and a voice that could calm a tornado.
Gordon looked at him with sad eyes, drooping much like the clouds, and struggled with what to say.
“Listen, Mr. Mart—”
“Please. Richard.”
“Sorry…Richard, um, I know we’ve had this talk before. You’ve been coming in here every Monday.” He paused, letting the sentence hang in the air, keeping his eyes on Richard’s. “Just think of the time you waste walking here.”
Richard stood with his hands in his pockets, fingering a loose piece of string along the stitching.
“Mr. Kingsley, right now I know no other way of living. Are you asking me to abandon the only thing that is keeping me alive?”
“Richard, you haven’t been alive for months. Look at yourself. The bags under your eyes have worsened, your hair is falling out, you’re losing the color in your skin, you’ve been wearing the same two outfits for weeks. For God’s sake, your hands are even starting to wrinkle.”
Richard sighed and dug his hands deeper into his pockets. In what he said next, he spoke with slow deliberation, as if laying every word out to be examined on the check-out counter.
“I know you are concerned, Mr. Kingsley, but you have nothing to worry about. I’m fine. I’ll find what I’m looking for.” His eyes seemed to lose some of their tiredness, his cheeks flushed blithely to an almost unnoticeable amount. “Besides, time heals everything, right?” And with this last remark, he curled his lips slightly into a smile.
Mr. Kingsley fidgeted with his watch and the lines in his forehead deepened until finally, he said,
“Alright. The usual, Richard?”
“Yes. The usual.”
“A seven-day time reversal and a seven-day time extender/concealment package—separate bags?”
“Yes. Don’t want the two rubbing elbows. Who knows what they’d do to each other in there, eh Mr. Kingsley?” He laughed and it sounded like gravel.
The shopkeeper bagged the items, swiped Richard’s credit card and said, “Goodbye, Mr. Martin. Have a good one.”
When he returned to his apartment, Richard indulged himself with a glass of scotch and sat down on the small sofa in his living room. He opened the first bag, inhaled, brought the tiny orange pill to his mouth, dropped it on his tongue, and swallowed.
…
“You look like the gears of a machine,” she said. “You even talk like one.”
“I’ve been going through some changes.”
She seemed strangely still. She sat on the stool placed in front of an empty canvas of a painting he’d been meaning to start. She was wearing her favorite dress, the pale yellow one with the flower print. Richard wondered if she wore the dress for the occasion of the end of their relationship. He wondered if women thought about those kinds of things. Her thin, black hair was tied up in a loose ponytail at the back of her head. Her bangs hung lazily over her eyebrows. She hadn’t shaved her legs in a few days and tiny, rigid hairs began to appear like small black houses on her calves. Her right hand was curled up in front of her lips with her elbow resting on her knee, blocking the escape of any words struggling to break free. And when she finally moved her hand down to her lap, her lips looked smooth and pink and wet. Freckles from the renewal of the sun emerged on the tops of her cheeks. Her eyes looked torpid and serpentine like flames. He knew she was going to speak soon—precisely in twenty seconds—he knew this because he lived this scene many times. He knew every inch of her and every inch of this conversation. And this time, he was sure of it, things would be different. He was almighty and through his ancient hands, he would bring deliverance.
“Richard, you and I are in completely different worlds right now.”
“But Lily, I’ve changed. Don’t you see? I could live forever inside your eyes.”
“But what about me? Where will I live?”
“You can live in my ribcage, right underneath my heart. I’ve made room for you.”
She sighed. “But I have no room in mine. Don’t you see how old you’ve become? We have nothing in common.”
Richard stood a few feet away from her, leaning against the doorway to his kitchen. His hands ached in his pockets. They wanted only to touch her face.
“I’m sorry, Richard. It’s over.” And with this, she stood up, gave him one last sorrowful glance and walked past him. Her scent stung in his nostrils. His muscles threatened to burst from his skin for want of reaching out to her. She walked out the door.
He stood in that spot for a while, the familiar pang of loss moving through him in slow, painful waves. He felt like crying but knew he didn’t have the energy. Finally, he moved to the stool and sat down. No matter how many times he’d lived this scene over, the restless feeling in his stomach never settled. Life outside of his apartment felt distant like a dream.
He grasped the second brown bag from his pocket and retrieved the two remaining pills—one blue and quite large, the other yellow and rather small. They sat in his palm like stones. He closed his eyes, relinquished the air from his lungs, brought them to his mouth, and tilted his head back.
…
When he opened his eyes, the air was thick. It covered everything in a viscous layer of seconds. His bones felt heavy. The dust danced in front of the window as if through water, slow and deadly like asteroids. He knew where he had to go.
He stepped out onto the stoop and the sun pushed its tired hands on his shoulders. He looked down at the absence of his shadow and pushed his feet against the ground. Like last week and the week before, everything appeared in slow motion. Legs moved up, out, down, up, out, down—coquettish and unabashed in their leisurely cycles. The tires of cars met the pavement like wet skin. Everything was washed in syrup. He, a ghost in the city, walked along the streets with purpose. Twenty minutes (twenty seconds to everyone else), he arrived at the apartment with the black 137 above the door. He walked in soundlessly.
She was there where she always was, lying on the couch. He walked over and knelt beside her. Her right arm was draped over the top of her head, her knee propped up at an angle, the folds in her dress light against her form. She looked more tired than he had remembered. The skin under her eyes looked wilted; her freckles seemed to fall underneath her skin. But it didn’t matter. In a dying world, she was the only thing left alive.
This went on, as it always had, for seven days. He followed her unobserved from the couch to the bathroom where her dress fell from her shoulders before stepping into the shower; the laundromat where the clothing danced in the washers; the coffee shop two blocks away where she always ordered a large vanilla latte; the local diner where she met with friends for tomato and mozzarella sandwiches and conversation; and her bedroom that smelled like lavender where she disappeared under her sheets at night. Lily’s routine hadn’t changed and his was constantly reinventing itself. But no matter what he did, it always ended the same. Time would catch up with itself, the eighth morning would come and Richard would once again be visible to the world. And invisible to Lily.
“Hello, Richard.”
“Morning, Gordon.” He smiled, despite the energy it took to do it. “Same as last week.”
Some of Mr. Kingsley’s composure was gone today. He looked sullen, skeletal. His arms were folded across his chest like a lock.
“Richard, how long do you wish to keep this going?”
“As long as it takes.”
“And how many variations of time alterations do you intend to try?”
“As many as it takes.”
Mr. Kingsley sighed. He made a low grunting noise in his throat.
“You began by buying more time to distract yourself. Then, when your tenuous career as a painter fell through, you reversed back two months to try to salvage the relationship. And after a few months when that didn’t work, you tried reversing back a month then a week then a day. Eventually, you became so desperate, you thought you could save it on the day she left you. But I don’t think you believed that for a second. Why else would you torture yourself following her around for a week? You’re still miserable, you’re deteriorating, and you’ve lost the truth of the whole situation.”
“And what, Mr. Kingsley, is the truth?”
“Lily no longer loves you.” And he responded so quickly and bluntly, Richard’s ribs rattled from the vibrations in his voice. The two men stood, separated by the counter, and looked into each other’s faces, neither unsure of what to say next.
Then, what felt like the first time in years, Richard took his hands out of his pockets. He leapt over the counter, thrust open the large cabinet that held the pills, grabbed the ones he needed and catapulted himself back over the counter. He ran out of the door, away from Mr. Kingsley, his dying manners, and his fading shouts. He ran all the way back to his apartment, his feet expelling muffled protests. He burst in through the door as if there was no other way of entering and marched into his living room, clutching the pills tightly in his hand. He didn’t notice the tears against his face. Without thinking or breathing, he swallowed them all.
…
The first thing he heard was silence. The kind of silence that hurts. It seemed to last forever. And suddenly, the air clicked and stuttered around him in segmented rhythms. The limbs of molecules were tearing themselves apart around him. The furniture in his apartment took on new forms. The couch turned into his favorite toy boat as a child; the coffee table into his mother’s laughter; the television into his father’s crooked teeth; the stool into the breasts of the first girl he made love to; the empty canvas into the colors of his longing. He was trapped in a luminous, horrible phantasmagoria—everything was destroying itself. Thousands of little deaths. He shut his eyes.
Whether they were shut for an hour, a month, a century, he didn’t know. Nor did he know how he gathered the strength to finally lift his eyelids—they felt as if they weighed an immeasurable amount, too large to describe. And the first thing he saw was white. So much white that for a moment, he forgot what color looked like. Then flowers. Then skin.
“Lily.” He said it so quietly, he wasn’t sure if he’d spoken at all.
“Richard,” she said and walked on the white toward him.
“I thought I lost you,” he said. The words fell clumsily from his lips. She smiled.
“You just weren’t looking in the right places.”
“I’m worried that the world is dead,” he said.
She placed his left hand over her heart and his right hand over his own heart, and the two little organs pounded with the tenacity of novae.
“How can the world be dead when we’re still alive?”
He placed his hand in the flowers on her hipbone and looked into her eyes. He would examine her face but he already had it memorized.
“Lily, how much do you love me?”
She stood before him thinking for a moment, letting her eyes rest on the curve of his jaw. It looked as if she already knew the answer. Eventually, her eyes returned to his.
“When we’re together, I feel like there are one-hundred of you. And all one-hundred of you are inside of me at once and I feel like I could burst at any moment.”
Richard looked at her and knew she was telling the truth. He held her close like a pearl and ran his fingers through her hair.
“You look like Aphrodite in this light,” he said. She smiled and ran her fingers down his arm like a song until her fingers reached his.
“Your hands are soft,” she said.
He looked down and realized she was right. His fingers felt like skin and silk, no longer like metal. He couldn’t remember what metal felt like; it had never existed to begin with. The wrinkles had smoothed themselves away. His body felt lucid, unperturbed, weightless. And everything stood still. The blood in his veins stopped flowing, his heart stopped pumping, the hair on his arms fell gently on his skin like infinitesimal feathers, the clouds whispered one last inaudible prayer in his ear before slipping away into some place filled with nothing. And the only thing left moving were the flames in her eyes. He rested his hand in the spot where her neck met her collar bone and sighed breathlessly. And everything was at such a terrible ease.
