RAPUNZEL'S CLOCK by Lisa Russ Spaar
Of all the gifts he could have brought her that she would seem to have no use for in the tower—a lawnmower, badminton set, high-heeled shoes— this clock was most whimsical and harmless at first, a toy house carved with vines, flaunting a frozen bird that popped in and out, and was always whisked away at the last chime, back through clenched doors, as though to store up the intervening hour in undistracted darkness. After a night of counting every hour, they destroyed the clock’s music to keep it secret from the Crone, though at night, while he slept, she could still hear its lurching gears, the tongue-less bird shuttling its muted cuckoos inside the cupboard where she kept it hidden. It became the tight heart she tuned her body to— the crumbs of afternoons, his absences, the gaining dark. Blood days. Days of waiting. Nights of visitation and violent blooming. So that in time she grew to need the clock’s white noise beneath her own body’s story— its given loneliness, its brief, incredible eruptions of hope.
