Beneath the Same Old Chin-Up Bars
Seized by a sudden sense of déjá vu, the boy looked up.
His eyes traveled to the wall clock above the chalkboard without any real thought. It was an analog style of clock, a round face with its circle of unfriendly black numbers, framed by a black rim. It was just about as far from showing “personality” or “decorative flair” as one could get and still be in the same universe. 52, 53, 54…The slightly warped second hand crawled oh-so-slowly around the yellowing clock face, marking time sluggishly. 57, 58, 59—
The minute hand clicked forward. According to a system of time from a faraway planet that had been in use since the colonization era, it was 2:57.
…What was that? He felt as if he’d lived that exact same moment before, but when he really thought about it, 2:57 happened twice a day whether anyone liked it or not, so that wasn’t really so weird.
He only tilted his head in confusion for a moment before looking back down and striking his near-empty lighter a few times to get his cigarette going. Sitting on the teacher’s desk and swinging his short legs back and forth, he gazed at the white chalk scribbles that filled the board in front of him.
“Today Sarah and Nahar are on duty!” “←That’s wrong! Seth changed it!” “Elisha had another ‘accident’ today!” “No I didn’t!” “Joachim and Sarah were kissing under the stairwell!” And there was more: drawings, like the one of the twisting railroad line that ran from one end of the board to the other, and the ones of what he could only assume were girls, even though he got the feeling the human body didn’t actually work that way, and that tiny little note in the corner—
“Please let the war end soon so we can go home.”
He didn’t know to whom that faint, unpracticed handwriting belonged or when it had been written there. But for some reason, no matter how many times new doodles got drawn over the old ones, that one note was always spared.
When he stretched out his right hand and rubbed at the board with his palm, he smeared part of the railway sideways. Chalk dust stuck to his fingers. He thought he’d scribbled something here, too, but he’d forgotten which one was his. It must have been one of these. Any of them but the “Please let the war end soon” one.
In the afternoon the classroom was deserted and quiet. Outside the wide-open window stretched the same unchanging sky they saw every day, faintly blurred by clouds of sand. The chilly late-autumn air lightly stirred the column of smoke rising from the tip of his cigarette. It carried with it the innocent whooping of the young boys playing in the schoolyard below. Mixed in with their cries, he could pick out snatches of timid singing.
Not only was the voice too soft to really hear, it was also horribly off-pitch—but it was a melody he knew well, so he had no trouble recognizing it. It was some stupid old song everybody learned in first or second grade, no matter what school they went to. Something about an old man and a big grandfather clock and ninety years doing something-or-other.
Tick, tock, tick, tock…
It was a lispy girl’s voice. Must be Elisha. He could picture the youngest girl in his class squatting beneath the chin-up bars, drawing a picture in the sand there and crooning her favorite phrases from the song in clumsy but clear tones.
“Erase that,” ordered a grumpy voice from somewhere outside of his line of sight. He turned away from the schoolyard window to find a boy his own age standing outside the window that opened into the hallway. This boy with colorless hair and eyes the same blue-gray as the sky was the only friend his own age left in the whole school. Although that sure didn’t mean they actually got along…
He followed the direction of that slate-gray gaze to the chalkboard. The “Joachim and Sarah were kissing under the stairwell!” caught his eye. He tilted his head, considering this for a moment. “So you really were, then.”
“No, we weren’t.”
“Right,” he retorted, grinning. A pebble flew at him from the hallway, grazing his cheek.
“No, we weren’t!”
“Okay, okay. You’re so violent.” Whether it was true or not, somebody had probably written it there to hassle them. Seth or one of his buddies, most likely.
A faint smile still lurked at the corner of his lips around his cigarette as he looked around for the eraser. Not finding it, he just rubbed out the names with his hand. It didn’t seem worth the effort to wipe off the whole thing.
His friend stood in the hallway watching him, elbows propped on the window ledge. (Don’t just stand there, come in here and erase the damn thing yourself! he thought.) Then he said in an offhand way, “Oh, hey, I heard a bunch of tanks came up and parked by the western wall this morning.”
“Huh. Why?”
“Dunno.”
“And?”
“Eh, that’s all.” And that was the end of that. Just a meaningless little exchange.
He didn’t care about the tanks, but there must be a lot of soldiers there, and that meant maybe he could get some smokes. As he let that childlike humming about the old clock wash over him, he thought that maybe if he was lucky he could get some gum and little chocolates, too. Stuff like that would make good presents for Elisha and the other kids.
Maybe we should go visit the soldiers tomorrow. If the weather’s nice.
“See you tomorrow, then,” the other boy told him casually, even though he hadn’t said a word of that out loud. When he blinked and turned around, his friend had already pushed himself lightly off the sill and stepped away.
“Joachim —”
“What?”
“Nothing.” He hadn’t particularly thought of anything to say before he’d called out to stop the other boy, so he just echoed, “See you tomorrow.”
“Sure.” Joachim nodded, turning away. He silently watched his friend leave. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the wall clock strike 3:00 on the dot. The long column of ash at the end of his cigarette fell and fluttered into his lap. The moment he looked down with a grunt of annoyance at himself, another flash of that weird déjá vu hit him.
He heard someone scream out in the schoolyard.
In the instant it took him to reflexively jerk his head up and slide off the desk, every windowpane in the building that faced the schoolyard swelled up in a distended bowl shape. A split second later, they all soundlessly shattered to pieces—well, maybe they’d made a sound, but the shock wave had ruptured his eardrums, and for a while the world was closed off in silence. A white mist filled the classroom, blanketing his vision and making him blind as well as deaf. He wasn’t sure if the mist was gun smoke or tiny shards of glass. The next thing he knew, the force of the blast had picked him up, and the side of his head was slamming into the chalkboard.
Body scraping down the board, he slowly sank to his knees on the podium. His eyes wandered vaguely around the room, almost without conscious thought. When they lit on the chalkboard, he saw a splattering of red over the drawing of the railroad, as if someone had thrown a paintbrush at it. He put a hand to his own temple. When he pulled it away, there on his chalk-stained palm was a thick smear of the same garish red. After a beat, he realized it was his own blood.
Now that his hearing was finally starting to return, he was assaulted by an awful, echoing wail like someone ringing a bell nonstop. The noise pounding at his brain made his head reel even more than the pain at his temple did. In some dim corner of his nonfunctioning mind, he just barely made out the first sound that seemed to have any meaning; it was his friend’s voice shrieking about something.
“— raim! Ephraim!”
Huh. That was his name the voice was calling. Joachim had been taking cover in the hallway; now the other boy was rushing to his side almost before he’d stood up. Ephraim didn’t see any reason for Joachim to look that desperate as he called his name—but what worried him a hell of a lot more was why he couldn’t hear Elisha singing anymore. He knew it would actually be weirder for someone to keep singing under the circumstances, but he couldn’t help his strange, stubborn belief that Elisha would.
Elisha’s time had stopped at 3:00, just like the clock on the wall, so she would never sing again.