Chapter 1

                        

                         

Mordecai Borders had become a scrupulous master of time during his tenure on Earth’s many cragged faces, yet not in the manner that most might think. For the christened moniker of Time’s solitary savant to be endowed with verisimilitude, a vast gallery of check-boxes needed to be assayed and tallied away. Objectives that were nimbly hurdled and achieved with flying colors. Merestones only accomplished in the caliginous alcove at the end of his second floor’s hallway, seldom unfettered by the adamantine haggard door chain. One he, on that banal Monday eve, decided to leave dangling from its languishing receptacle. Heedless to the immense looming hazard of his brittle concentration being torn to trifling tinsel. 

His meek unboasting domicile sat plumb in Bay Village’s thrumming nave was nothing to polarize the slimmest datum of attention. Across all economic spectrums, no lineament of the Borders’ family home was worth a fleeting bat of the eye. From the complacent denizens of the teeming middle-class to the groveling ragamuffins of poverty, from which escape was a piteous yearning. The scuffed vermillion bricks of its feet, stygian roof polka-dotted with rested shingles, plaguy stripes of paint carved from the marred exterior. It wasn’t an abominable eyesore worthy of immediate immolation. Nor was it an elysian paradigm of unflawed architecture. Nestled in the grove between two stark extremities. A crevasse that, regardless of the magnitude of one’s resistance, there was no circumventing the unceasing platitude. That was a lesson learned hard-and-fast by a stalwart Mordecai. As opposed to lazing in the bubbling cauldron of despair and capitulation to his state of affairs, he gave life to an ingenious idea. Fabricating his own cauldron, forged in the vehement crucible of striving for the unfeasible. Perhaps absconding from the trite perpetually turning gears of the modern world was, in every sense, attainable solely in the wildest of dreams. But, as history has exhibited time after time, recognizing the innate unachievable nature of his goals ne’er stymied his path. 

Down the raviny road he sauntered down for years without end, this was his doubtless magnum opus. The beatified nook in the corner of his second floor. An irreplicable singularity in the vast cosmos that stood as an unwavering haven for the man. A peerless cavity in the vast nebulous cosmos that subsisted without rivals, one he couldn’t wish to mimic anywhere else. It was a forsaken storage closet nestled at the slender corridor’s end. For the first trimester of their vapid sojourn, its utility was far from recognized by any watchful member of the household. All sans Mordecai Borders. Once the vision of its shoreless efficacy grazed across his vision, his eyes were swiftly out on stalks. 

What had previously been a vacuous vault of crude darkness and a sprawling mosaic of satiny cobwebs was baptized in the light of Mordecai’s unbounded ambition. Transformed from an inveterate husk with a full belly of dust bunnies and skulking ravels of spiders into a corporeal apparatus of the man’s zealous appetites. Bar an incandescent bulb dangling by a silver beaded chain from the ceiling, all tokens of cumulative decrepitude were purged from the closet. Its newfound purport was manifest, and Mordecai Borders was the hallowed redeemer wrapped in silk who sowed salvation upon it. In a few day’s time, Mordecai Borders had chiseled the closet in stringent accordance to his ravishing reveries. A pluperfect matrix where no wraith of distraction could ravage him. Not a blip of the outside’s unending anarchy and restive ferment could perforate his paradise. Few words harbored the expertise to properly explicate the arcadia he manufactured.

Beautiful. 

Exquisite. 

Arrant perfection.

The room’s breadth and dimensions would be an earthly hell for most. A bantam two-by-four room with a scant quantity of indispensable organs. A lofty walnut bookshelf stood stolid against the right wall aslosh with rows of books. All of them delineating the scrutinous, fastidious art of clockmaking and watch repair. A black metal filing cabinet with a trifecta of capacious drawers, each accoutered by gleaming silver handles. Its flesh unmarred by any vexing dents or acrid abrasions. At the forefront of the room, the fulgent cream of the bounteous crops, a pantopic brichen work bench standing on stygian aluminum legs. Naught but the requisite essentials were all that dwelled upon its unflawed face. A middling shadeless lamp plated in the blackest metals, a gaping scarlet toolbox vomiting with dark-steeled tools and tatty instruments. Their integral usage far from exhausted, a conspicuous Judas to its dilapidated exterior. Roosting in the top-left corner, basking in its fathomless glory, was a tabletop clock. One fabricated by the reputable hands and optimum aptitude of Boston’s prestigious watchmaker. Its frame forged from glooming walnut-oak and scintillating with a fleckless varnish. Blanch face and cursive numbers bordered in splendent bona fide ten-karat gold, gleaming in the ungenerous morsels of lamplight not devoured by the present project.

Above all, the most priceless facet of that room that defied all mortal values or costs, was the reverent elixir that dowered the world’s listless facets with invaluable meaning. 

Splayed upon a lily-white microfiber rag in the table’s center sat the dissected body of a scintillating baroque watch. The raging heart of Mordecai Borders. His treasured livelihood. The solitary grounds behind wrenching himself from his cocoon of blankets and sorrow morning after morning. The reason he put forth the conscientious effort to draw breath into jaded lungs. To replete his craw with workaday sustenance. To accord his family the chance to live and love, to ascertain the globe’s secrets and master its unjust formulas. 

Anyone who was anyone occupying Bay Village knew of Mordecai Borders. In spite of his unfaltering fears that the market for tailor-made clocks was a moribund practice, the patronage trumped his every expectation. For years following his assimilation, he often found himself pondering deep into the placid twilight hours of how his fortune came to his feet. Comely prices? Veracious intrigue? The inability to diagnose a reason not to? He was never entirely certain, and the inquisition to discover the rationale behind it attenuated. 

Mordecai stared down at the cream-colored waist-high table, visage as vacuous as a starless night, and scratched his bare chin with a forefinger, sleeved in the rubbery azure latex of medical gloves. He had been gimmicking with the disemboweled trinket for what stretched into two hours. An exemplary savant of time paid no mind to slapdash laxity. The substantive elements of his dominated craft were unmistakable. Two superlative qualities molded the faultless clockmaker, no ifs, ands, or buts to refute it. 

A bottomless well of patience and a manic fervor for the field. If any aspiring virtuosos were bereft of those paramount qualities, their unpitying stars had been crossed long ago. 

Mordecai’s current undertaking, a diminutive grain in the hundreds he consummated beneath nitid amber lamplight, was beseeched by an elder dwelling in an apartment a stone’s throw down the clamorous street. A hard-weathered geriatric blighted by unbounded congeries of trench-like wrinkles and furrows, graven into every cubic centimeter of the senior’s timeworn countenance. Forthright byproducts of a long-winded existence lacquered in catalytic toils and arduous travails. Each and every inscribed variegated insignia wholly unequaled in its own dismal fashion. The faded wearied tendrils of sharp crimson slinking into his sclera. Its crufty grasps reaching to the blurred vibrance of his addled irises. Ponderous eyebags accoutered with the most tartarean palette the human eye could cognize. Midnight black, the purple of trounced plums, a blank lifeless plain of twilight wrung into liquid form. Those dastardly coin pouches of inky gloom dangled from his bottom lids and polarized the consummative totality of the clockmaker’s observations.

The elder rapped upon the sedulous male’s door early the previous evening. Clasped in his eroded pallid hand, shielded from the final shafts of luster from the drowning afternoon sun by gnarled fingers, was the apple of his fading eye. His most prized possession that existed without potent opposition. An unblemished gleaming sterling silver watch furnished with a scruffy jade-green band and chafed brass buckle. Only a meager two blights dug its barbed hooks into Mordecai’s unsegmented focus. The solicitude lying in a slender crack lashed across the gibbous glass and the surcease bringing the ticking hands to a static stalemate. The white-haired man explicated the watch’s fable through a dense screen of doleful tears. 

It was granted to him almost two decades ago in a characterless point in the rank depths of Michigan. In a tranquil cabin erected along the coast of its hallmark lake, the senior and his jubilant wife resided for years on end. As the barbarous baron of time and vitality often did, the hapless woman was inveterate to its influence and, in a matter of less than a year, an edacious cancer withered his lover to a decrepit skeleton. On her deathbed, she bequeathed the eminent article of jewelry to the man. With a final memento seized with an inexpugnable grasp, he packed his bags cheek-to-jowl and fled the ravenous hordes of melancholy. He sought refuge from their indiscriminate wrath and, as time would tell, Boston espoused the geriatric until a lamentable defect brought him to the doorstep of Mordecai Borders. 

Within the cimmerian cubicle of dark-oak walls and the circumscribed camaraderie of his solitary companion, the lone light swinging aimlessly above, he beavered away. Minutes soared with blinding alacrity. Seconds were bullets. Hours melted into unbottomed tubs. Beneath the curious gaze of the motley strips of book spines, he toiled. Against the agog stare of his oceanic provisions of tools, he toiled. His labors fulfilled with a vacant countenance, one only seen in a statue of an immemorial Greek tragedy. Whether it was inviolable concentration or a lethal destitute of merriment was a mystery to Earth’s innumerable denizens but none more than the owner of that hollow visage. All his life, he was loyal to the belief that the depths and margins of human confusion, like all entities, bore confines. When it came to the bemusing enigma of his features, he soon discovered the flagrant truth. 

Mordecai gimmicked with the watch’s innards splayed across the rag. Brittle gears. Tenuous jewels. A teeming minefield where a singular tremor of the hand or benign error would scrawl inexorable doom across the stars. One that no master of time could rectify.

Outside the gutted watch’s grimless confines was the mammoth atoll of its brass and silver innards. Aureate cogs of all sizes and dimensions, the largest no bigger than a penny, with an austere scarcity of identical constituents. Bewildering, ornate configurations of perplexing shapes and lines meshed to mold alien shapes. Intricate components that harbored far more palpable clarity as puzzling descriptions than physical, graspable objects. And even then, irrespective of the untrumpable mastery of the orator, any portrayal rasped by human lips would fail to deliver it with the proper justice. Clenched by punctilious digits, his voracious faculty beaming through the lank latex, was a pair of immaculate tweezers pampering the Lilliputian organs with opaque caution. Tutelage unending. The solitary unrivaled bastion allocating the prodigal gluts of infrangible protection to the watch’s precarious elements. Gazing down with preeminent angelic heed as though every last metal artifact were his own treasured children. His flesh and blood, the vitality and benevolence in his heart crafted into tangible objects perceivable to the irises and covetous hands of the world at large.  

Mordecai seldom left his indomitable dome of ironclad concentration unlauded. The frequently unsung champion of his brittle sanity. Without a rigid regiment of focus that wasn’t riven across the stars at the slightest creak of a headboard or badgersome rodent scouring the woeful attic, nothing would get accomplished in that paradisal cavity. Money wouldn’t satiate his wallet’s titanic craw. His kitchen would remain an arid wasteland, as it had in the burgeoning tribulations of yesteryear. Although, by countless accounts, this adamantine king’s armor of stout assiduity was a pluperfect gift from heaven’s vast kingdoms, yet a curse in the same breath. He was a maestro in the delicate craft of smelting his home’s tumult into the crucible of stagnant white noise. A static dale flowing in pluperfect bliss. 

It cinched his desired quota beyond a hazy wisp of doubt. Resuscitating him from the septic maw of his family’s routine gauntlet of frivolous moils and trials. Yet, as euphoric as he proclaimed his closet to be, the galaxy behind his door never ceased its circadian churning. Ghostly murmurs swam throughout the hollow walls and crypt-like hallways. The sordid breath of hulking quandaries misted the Borders’ abode. No matter the day, surcease was a foreign delicacy no one beneath his roof could afford.

One would surmise that the resolute, unvacillating faculty of his sensuous fortifications was, in every conceivable sense of the word, unstaunchable. It bowed to no creature, neither man nor monster. Recognized no extrinsic force as worthy competition to lock horns with its brawn. And those who subscribed to that notion would nary be faulted for their brisk assumptions. However, following the footsteps of every organism on the sinful scapes of Earth, a weakness always slithered beneath the surface. Swallowed by the illimitable pockets of inky shadow, raring for the coveted opportunity to accord sanctuary to the blemishes. And to say they were exemplary at their repugnant duties would be a foul understatement. Throughout the boundless expanse of the raucous Massachusetts, there was a solitary distractor that his holy mausoleum feared.

The one living in the floor under his feet. 

The very same location where the blurred growl of broken glass rumbled through the floor, floated into the serene air of his closet, and pillaged the tranquility. Like ravenous Vikings, the din ransacked the priceless tranquility and left nothing in its wake.

“F**k!” He muttered through an ivory bulwark of gnashed teeth. “Son of a b***h! What is it now?”

Tools paralyzed in his digits. Hands static, chassis unmoving. Frame bubbling with the kinetic potency of his wrath, a thunderous fusillade that threatened to hammer down upon his home. Not an irritant was extant across reality’s mind-splitting breath that could stand chest-to-chest with this. The vehement animus of staring at his fragmented concentration sizzling to embers before his enkindled irises. 

 He rubbed his furrowed eyes with gloved fingers, sailing a palm down his hazel scalp. He gingerly placed the cog on the rag’s corner and hucked his tweezers into the crapulent toolbox. Cramming his stripped cyan gloves in his pants pocket, he landed his blazing stare to his tailor-made clock. The apple of his loveful eye, the superlative of his countless joys in the cosmos of his craft. The needle-thin arms pointed at the eqloqu 

Their upstairs hallway was tame yet elegant in its simplicity. A lithesome baroque rug striping down the middle with margins of dark wood flooring, sleek as ballroom tiles. The carpet a coalesce of seafoam-green, rich purple, and chalky white all arrayed in an oracular pattern. A byzantine design one would expect to happen upon in the mezzanine of an Italian mansion. The viridescent wallpaper was ever-vigorous and gridded with tiny violet diamonds. Bar the closet, only four measly walnut doors filled the second floor. One directly across guarding the privacy of the bathroom and two more on the left wall. The bedrooms for his children, one of which stood at the median of the hallway, glowering down the stairs. 

His teenage son. The ill-humored Chuck Borders. A thirteen-year-old brimming flask of tempestuous ire armed with an avid indisposition, waiting for a star-crossed soul to pop the cork of his incendiary choler. He hardly filled the hems of his jade-green joggers yet filled the sleeves of his stone-grey tee. A shambolic hoard of mousy hair swathing his cranium. Hands laced against the back of his head with a visage galvanized by an unequalled vexation. Countenance bathed in the sightless riotous flames of his emotions. A frenetic blaze of deadpan aggravation and foaming ire where the victor of their perennial clash gagged on ambiguity. 

Two ice-blue irises greeted the pepful emeralds of his father. Vortexes of wan, paling cobalt rife with ill-coveted exasperation meshed with the chafed vivace of Mordecai’s globes. The teen’s treasonous visage brought the almighty cane of perfidy down upon his exertions to secrete his pique. 

“What is it this time?” The male questioned.

“Oscar’s being an a*****e again!” His son rejoindered. “He’s been hogging the TV and screaming at it all night. Threw a f*****g bottle at me when I walked off!”

“Watch your mouth! Don’t make a habit out of it.” His father admonished.

The corners of Chuck’s lips crimped in doubtless choler. Every chasm of every alley in his nervous system repulsed in unequivocal discontent. All culminating into the grandiose finale of an envenomed snarl, a custom that wasn’t nothing novel or expectation-shattering in the Borders’ abode.

“Whatever, Mordecai.”

Mordecai couldn’t help but ruminate over his offspring’s face.

That face…

The one feature from Mordecai’s shoreless gallery of genes and transmutable hallmarks he feared with thunderous passion would be saddled upon his graceless child. The brown-haired man’s visage was one that, over the expanse of nigh-forty strenuous, parlous years, he grew to view with a skyscraping echelon of disdain. Ever since his age crested his early twenties, an epoch far before the era of Chuck and his flawful ragged family, the comments came in whirling torrents. From the accounts of countless, Mordecai Borders looked eerily redolent to a barbarous butcher of women from decades prior. 

Theodore Robert Bundy.

A rampant comparison he loathed. An analogy warranting storms of wroth fury and revolt that no other force upon the Earth could ever dream of warranting. Every man he met, every shallow date he ever embarked on, all reverberated the same seagulled utterances. From his innate swept voluptuous locks, the resplendent hue of his irises, an immaculate smile he donned with a shocking drought of pride. A grin to banish the grunge and melancholy of all within a ten-mile radius of him. 

To bear the semblances of that callous, feral beast cowering behind a tapestry of human flesh and ichor for years beyond his memory was one thing. To see the evitability of a mirrored fate befalling his firstborn was…something different entirely. All he could do was pray his son’s keen irises and masquerade that exhibited scant effort in blunting his emotions ne’er merited those badgersome inquiries.

Chuck folded his wiry arms over his scraggy chest with a fingertip fidgeting with his bicep. Scratching the modicum of skin perpetually without terminus. A tic that grasped no ends or bounds to its bemusing nature. 

Mordecai dredged a verbose sigh from the hadal fathoms of his lungs. Yet another mundane habit in their home. 

“I’ll deal with it. Just stay in your home until I come back up here. Who knows what it’ll be tonight.”

“Sure, I guess.” His son swiveled his frame to the gaping doorway of his bedroom. A spartan mouth illuminated by a singular blanch bulb. Its fluorescence as spiritless as the exchange seconds before. 

Mordecai frowned. “You doing okay, son?”

“Yeah!” The boy snarled. “Just go deal with him.”

No matter how one shut the dense doors peppering the house, the thick wood invariably sounded identical to an earnest slam. But no crashing of timber against a doorframe could rival the sorrowful pounding of his heart. He swallowed the pulp of his woe and massaged his eyes with two digits and converged his focus to the bottom floor. The kernel of another volley of senseless stentorian shouts. 

An abiding rampageous creek of molten sound made hazy by the sheer inordinate volume surged from below. Bursts of spasmodic cheers and gibes of unknown disposition swam with the river of noise. Whether joy or scalding anger was anyone’s guess. One would have more fortune mindlessly scratching lottery tickets with their eyes on stalks then correctly pinpointing the emotion. Mordecai couldn’t bother.

He rested a palm atop the sleek mahogany handrail adjoined to the wall with flush brass brackets. The steps were fabricated from the selfsame wood endowed upon almost every undeviating plane of the home. That rich, impeccable walnut that sparkled in faultless glory. Glistenting in the distilled light as though varnished in the waters of the bona fide river Styx. Polka-dotting the wall were a trifling number of chromos framed in faux-gold and black-painted wood. The largest one was a gathering of his fragmented family. Mordecai, his wife, Chuck, his daughter all clustered in a ravel of felicity in the forefront, with his cousin Oscar looming behind. All wielding grins that Icarus himself would be prideful in soaring all-too-close to. Chuck at his first little-league game. His third birthday. The reunion of Oscar returning from overseas, clad in his wrinkled camo and sublime medals tacked onto his breast pocket. 

He shot them a fleeting gaze. Doleful mien reflected in the spotless glass. The dichotomy vociferous. Yet the period for reminiscing over bygone joys had long passed. All he had now was inexorable quarrels to pacify and a child who could hardly bear to look him in the eyes. 

Sprawled across the first-floor was the hub of the domicile. The place adored and lauded by all who paid him a heartful visit. Directly across the bottom of the stairs was the ponderous front door. To the right was the affable recreation lounge open with stretched amiable arms to guests and family. A hardwood tract with a black velvet couch equipped with two love seats, a mammoth coffee table with an isolated seasonal candle, a forty-three inch television, and a long table stretched against the wall. Chock-full with a manifold of prosperous potted ferns, cacti, and exotic flowers. Splayed across the wall above the plants was a photograph of a Bison standing before a whiskey-colored afternoon vista, feasting upon the knee-high grass of a pasture. Gallant horns and vast frame bathed in inky shadow. 

He tailed the din to the small hall with two yawning archways. One pouring into the white-and-black checkered tiles of the kitchen, another into the conquered living room, and another dense door to the backyard. Standing prodigious against the wall was a sageful cherrywood grandfather clock. An unabated machination by the very one who gawked at its renown and felt wholly unworthy of breathing within its presence. Exhaling a divine smog of exaltation that was, once upon a time, nothing more than a superfluous woolgathering colored by a raging fervor. It blessed him with a gift. A tiny grin that lasted no longer than a few seconds. 

He winced at the ever-burgeoning clamor. The booms louder. The bellowing of enraptured commentators, the squeaking of shoes against a basketball court, the tornado siren of an electrified crowd. It all smelted into a mallet of discord that smashed into his ears without surcease. Splintered his skull with every barbaric strike. At his feet was a clutch of sherds of glass with the nose of the bottle somehow intact. Sitting amongst its ruptured brethren in the murky pond of alcohol. The beer donned a malador he knew better than any man alive. Pungent apples and worthless heaps of despair. 

He gazed at the shambles like a crestfallen king staring at the ruination of his fallen city. Titanic sable blocks of desolate buildings. Skeletons of gallant edifices and monuments charred to a dour crisp. All gazed upon by dolour that surpassed all means of measurement or identification. The rambunctious from the living room stormed to a ferocious crescendo. Ireful bellows and the strident cumulative wail of televised spectators chewing every last sorry scrap of quietude. Mordecai sighed once more. His head dangling low a few seconds’ time. The exhalation leaden with decidedly profound fatigue exceeding the last. He swallowed a mouthful of taut air and dredged through the quagmire of pandemonium. Crossing the archway. Black cotton socks planted in the vivid brown carpet with brassbound tenacity. Launching the harpoons of his whetted glower into the undeterrable maestro of this nightly recital of madness. 

A burly bronze-skinned man sitting plumb upon his tatterdemalion. That timeworn burgundy leather couch with thick rounded arms, the remainder of its frame having witnessed the sheen of far better days. Nail-thin tiger stripes blighted the back in lengthy strokes like morose gills colored white by the downy textile beneath. The left and right cushions permitted limitless clemency by the inhumane waves of decay’s savage will. Its center bore the brunt of its rigorous employed years, nigh on sunk into the floor and imploring to be retired to a stilly storage unit for its vapid twilight years.

The living room was, at least in the reciprocal opinions of its profuse visitors, to be the superlative amidst the house’s myriad of rooms and amenities. A lavish, unstinting cavity far afield from the humdrum droning of Bay Village’s vibrant streets and bustling laborers. Not the slimmest wraith of the globe’s infernal feasts of gratuitous sounds probed the placid room.

Twin ebony bookshelves imposed against the walls and stared down its nose at the inferior articles beneath it. Engorged only on the intricately cherry-picked opuses of Lovecraft and the enigmatic Kafka, their dust-logged spines glaring with unfettered scrutiny. A broad window rested at the far back wall with a cot-like rest assuming the stead of a jerry-rigged indoor windowsill accoutered with an indigo throw pillow and a nova-white blanket. Its vermillion curtains were drawn yet the stolid stygian countenance of the blooming dusk loomed behind, the shrill ditty of insatiable crickets heralded its gloomful subjection. Five vacant Crisp Apple bottles, one toppled, sat in quasi-uniformity upon the mahogany coffee table tattooed by surly condensation rings. 

“Hello, Mister Clockman!” Oscar Armitage boomed from his pedestal. “What got you out of your cave?”

Mordecai snapped his flummoxed stare to the macro television sitting high upon its towering entertainment stand. Game seven of the NBA finals. Boston vs Memphis. Celtics down by twenty in the third quarter. He stifled another routine sigh. Oscar reached for the remote nesting on the coffee table and hammered cessation upon the ceaseless, ungodly tumult. 

The pair floundered in the oily silence for seconds that passed like shifting icebergs.

“Get up. Let Chuck have the TV.” Spoke Mordecai, hucking a fleeting gaze at the blot of shards. “What the hell possessed you to throw another bottle at my son?”

Oscar shifted on the couch. The maroon leather groaned beneath his heft. “The Celtics are down, Mordecai.” He uttered with a faint but unquestionably jarring slur. 

Mordecai’s cousin was the largest man he’d ever harbor the pleasure of meeting. Possessing an unboasted six feet of height and robust ironclad pythons thick as sewage pipes. Broad jaw with a hideous maw of teeth gilded by nicotine stains. Rapier-like hazel globes sat under the canopies of bushy eyebrows with cropped jet-black hair crawling across his scalp. Mandible fuzzy with the dark lichen of a five-o’clock shadow unmitigated and left to its own devices for a time only God could remember. Days? Weeks? Months? Whenever the last time Oscar departed the Borders’ residence was, and that could’ve been eons ago for all they knew.

Mordecai clenched and eased his fists more than he could count. “You really think that’s a good excuse?”

“It’s something.” He leaned against the scarred back of the couch. Build akin to a small mini-fridge housed by a crimson sweatshirt checkered by pinhead-sized holes with a bib of sweat inundating his collar. “Little b*****d shouldn’t have badgered me in the first place.”

The jabs at his son threw a cloak of gasoline over his heart. He wanted to soar above the clouds in an uncontestable rage. Give his flapping jaws an autonomy of their own. Let the deep-rooted arcanums coiled in the abyssal pits of his soul swallow a breath of brisk outside air. All he could hardly manage was a mighty breath and an ogle of unadulterated pity at the wretched, hapless being before him. 

Quietude reigned supreme for a few seconds more. Oscar shifted on the couch in his begrimed basketball shorts once more. The leather creaked. 

When the sun departed the cyanic oblivion above and the conquest-starved moon stormed to the throne, bringing his teeming acolytes of gleaming stars in tow, that was the cue for ghastly performance to commence. The exact extremity of the exhibit left to the unfeeling hands of chance. Only a cast of unseen dice determined the night Mordecai and his son were in to experience the full unbridled aggregate of. A handful of otiose beers. Acrid vodka. The flaming wrath of whiskey. The possibilities were shoreless and the potentiality of grave peril for each was equally inexhaustible. 

“Who do you think you are?”

“You know what I am,” Oscar snarled. He leaned forward and stabbed a minatory finger at the man. “You know exactly what I am! What I turned myself into! Don’t you remember?”

Mordecai stood unfazed. He shrugged and his hands slapped against his thighs. “How long are you gonna keep doing this?”

“What did you say?” His eyes flared.

“How long are you gonna keep this up? This charade’s gotta stop eventually. It can’t last forever.”

“Why can’t it? It’s just a hobby, Mordecai. A little pastime that gets me out of bed. What’s the harm in that?”

“I can’t have this rubbed off on my kids. You wanna see Chuck wind up like this? Screaming and throwing glass at teenagers?” He rejoindered. “So, tell me, when are you gonna get a grip?”

The truth to the matter was, irrespective of the lilliputian flimmers of sophomoric hope he bowed to, those pipe dreams of a future luminous with prosperity were turning in their graves. Corpses riddled with gangrene. The earth denuding the ineffectual flesh from roping their bleached bones far beneath the eye’s capabilities. Hauled down leagues beneath the soil and worming under the rigid bedrock. There was no appealing to the living, breathing vassal donning the skin of Oscar Armitage. It was a custom that visited them eventide after another. With the moon’s haunting sojourns came the arousing of the twisted species of lycanthropic ire. And, notwithstanding the Herculean vigor of their efforts and the echelon of their acrimony, their toils were elementally vain. 

There was no beguiling the tart elixir from his hands. No whisking the bitter toxins from his throat. Hell, Mordecai wasn’t sure the phalanxes of Heaven’s finest warriors could wrench the bottle from his copper-skinned fingers. If he was cognizant of their manifest intentions, he would almost certainly fell the empyrean kingdom to its knees for his greatest love. Chuck had rescinded long ago and ebbed into the tenebrosity of his room. His father was nary privy to complacency. 

Night after night, he attempted.

Night after night, the foulest of utterances rocketed from their lips. 

Night after night, the show always went on. Zero exceptions. 

‘Maybe tonight will be different,’ He always pondered. The nave of his unceasing mulling. ‘Maybe tonight I can crack through his head. Make him see the damage he’s caused to the family.’

But it was always rusted knives hurled at a chevalier in glinting armor. 

Oscar bounded to his feet. Calves rocking the ill-fated coffee table. The remnants of his avaricious imbibing jingled, more toppled and rolled across the varnished wood. A straggler gyrated and plummeted onto the downy carpet. 

“Who do you think you are!? I want an answer!” He exclaimed, stepping closer. “You think you’re a model man? A half-decent father? Are you kidding me!?” A guffaw thundered from the core of his belly. His breath sullied with the pungent malador of his untrumped beloved. The fetid malador of sour, acerbic apples from his malevolent tonic, disgorging the vile miasma into inculpable air. 

Mordecai’s frame recoiled in ineffable abject dismay, nose cowering from the mighteous fetid stench. “Are you sure you wanna get into this again?”

“I’d love to! You’re so quick to lay your judgement on me on your worthless high horse for what? What!? Just to find another woman to leave your punk-a*s? Make another ungrateful child to blow snot bubbles and ditch you?”

“Watch your tongue-”

“The man who let his family run for the hills? The man who rots in that f*****g cell waiting for the world to kiss his feet?” He rammed a calloused digit into his sternum after every loathful, odorous sentence. Fingertip aching against the stolid bulwark of ribs. His zealous ticker hammered behind the cocoon of bone. Perhaps rushing a mite far too fast. 

“You mean to tell me that’s the man who thinks he’s an example? What a f*****g joke.”

The opaque slurred resentment would’ve charred any human being extant in the solar system to their bones. Scorched them down into an accursed revenant of unfiltered baleful rancor. No matter how limitless their patience or the benevolence of the heavenly virtues that shepherded them, their granulated forbearance would be in a molten porridge. But it wasn’t his cousin’s infernal words and searing lampoons that disquieted him. It was, bereft of a datum of doubt, it was the soaring of his heart. 

Beating. 

Beating.

Flapping countless lightyears a minute. Each thump impaling icy pangs. 

His breath escaped him. Aspiration was a scrupulous gauntlet that whittled at the mind and accepted null except the champion living amongst plebians. The air seeming rarefied, breathing as though atop Everest’s summit. 

“You call that ‘work’. ‘Providing for the family’.” Oscar mocked. His octaves augmented into a flagrant shout. “You wanna know how I worked? I gave everything I had for this country! My innocence, my youth, whenever chances I had, I threw it all into the flames for the f*****g Corps! You wanna know what it gave me, huh? Can you guess? Absolutely nothing!” 

The world pirouetted around him. His head staticky and awash with formless stardust. Ill-starred brain and body anchored while the remainder of the savage world spun on its own axis, faster than his murky psyche could fathom. Every palpable object with a physical form to grasp and ogle fled from his irises. Any iota of eye contact negated by the breakneck carousel. The stock-still fulgent chromo on the TV, the bookshelves crammed cheek-to-jowl with the most sophisticated of antiquarian works, the static ceiling fan. It all stampeded to the sharp left the instant his pupils landed. 

His knees were molasses. Bones to melting rubber. 

“I watched my friends get blown to pieces! Franklin got his arm shot off. Davey got a bullet straight through his eye. I got the worst fate out of all of them, Mordecai. I was the only one alive to witness it. Can you believe that!?”

The malador fumigating Mordecai’s visage defiled the scant measly breaths he somehow, by glittering strokes of divine fortune, wrangled into his heaving lungs. He stumbled on his feet like an inebriated sailor lurching across a tottering deck. He hounded after a breath yet his eluded his disheartened clutches time after time. 

“What’s it to you?” Oscar slurred, cocking a brow at the perplexing display. The choked gasps helped weld the pieces together to the vexing conclusion. A starburst of aggravation seized dominion. “Not this s**t again!”

“Oscar! O-Osc-” He gasped.

A behemoth freighter of tungsten bricks ensconced itself upon his chest. Ribs strangled by that unhallowed heft. He threw a pleading palm onto his cousin’s strapping chest and the callous colossus swatted his wrist. Oscar sidestepped, glowering at Mordecai’s swift descent with a coiled visage of patent distaste. 

Mordecai crashed down upon the sofa, burgundy leather murmuring in flagrant objection, and all but liquefied into the nook between the armrest and hard-weathered back. Begriped in his sweat-lathered hand was a tortive fistful of cotton. Chassis undulating in the organic armor of mountainous, arduous breaths. Oscar moved laggard to his throne and eased his rump beside him. Jungly forearms perched on his knees. Mordecai’s world ceased its stomach-punching gyrating.

Quietude was king for a time no one alive bothered to denote. The spectrum from meager minutes to sapping hours was too wide for random suppositions. 

“Those…those spells you’ve been getting in…” Oscar spoke low. Tacking a precise name to his tone was unfeasible, but its fugitive spark of amiability was a half-hearted hint. “What do you plan on doing?”

Mordecai cleared his throat and flexed his hand, smoothing the twisted wrinkles against his sternum. “The doctor’s coming by tomorrow. It ain’t good. It’s only getting worse.”

“You got any ideas?”

The brief answer? No. 

The meticulous answer? Mordecai wouldn’t call them ideas that brewed in the inharmonic cauldron of his skull. These episodes walloping him with waxing frequency could only be one of two things. A trouble that a variegated octagon case of tinctures could briskly remedy, or a herald of the nebulous kismet of his family. Hampers with the heart and lungs, especially those that magnetize a body to the floor or nighest furniture, were miles away from the infantile obstacles hurdled by a simplex doctor visit. 

“Not the slightest clue.” Mordecai replied. “Who really knows? This could be the end of old Mordecai Borders. The Bay Village hermit.”

Oscar stared with doelike eyes brimming with pullulating dejection. Mordecai rose to his feet and took a long stride to the archway. The couch moaned. 

“You’ve had enough tonight. The fridge better not be empty in the morning.“ 

“You know…” Mordecai stopped and craned his head. “If anything happens to you, I got this family on my back. I’ll take care of them. You know I will.”

“Is that you talking or the liquor?”

Oscar chortled and nestled deep into his spot. A fallacy? A veracious promise? The brunete would give the lion’s share of his funds to anyone who could grant him a vivid answer. 

“Whatever. You wouldn’t know a decent offer if it beat you half to death.”

“How would you deal with my boy, then? Bash a bottle over his head when he gets too pissy?”

“It’s better than whatever plan you got in that head of yours.”

Mordecai paused and funneled his languid, oracular gaze with the drunken brew of Oscar’s. Two emeralds abrim with divine vivace locked horns with a thoughtless umber stare akin to two unplumbed vortexes of twirling gunsmoke. Misty opacity enriching with every revolution into those unending chasms. The male doubted his glossy vexed irises truly possessed a bottom. Nothing than mere spinning and spinning with zero bounds. Burrowing deep into the chthonian ill-conceited sentiments broiling in their own bespoke crucible, touched only by the feverish excavation of the bellywash.

Without any inexplicable prescient expertise, one of two sole events were slated to transpire in the ephemeral remainder of Oscar’s consciousness. He’d unpause his cutthroat game, endure another quarter of drunken lethargy if luck endorsed him that grim night, and fall prey to a spongy slumber. The other option, the one immensely preferred by the jaded clockmaker, was wiping away the stilled spirited screen to a panel of impermeable black and surrendering. Letting the pale-white flags of resignation flutter. Become nothing more than another blitheless victim of the panoptic, voracious maw of respite and its bewitching stipulations. To drift listless among the moribund duskful waters with the spasmodic wince of a roiling craw bubbling with septic liquor was his pinnacle. A covetous dream hounded into the ceaseless expanses of his arid psyche until he smelted into the leather. 

Mordecai harbored his salient penchants, but his inefficacious heart was replete with soupy indifference. He pivoted on his heels and sauntered through the thewless corridors. Thumbing every erect light switch that dared to grace his scrutinous vision. The home fell smothered to a leaden gag of impregnable silence, as it always did when Oscar’s otiose decision was selected. Not the soundless placidity he’d kill and die to experience if only for the slimmest of sparse iotas. But a bastardized spate of fraught quietude smoky with the repugnant miasma of disconcertion.

It wasn’t the innate spells of exhaustion every specimen of the human race experienced during the elysian incumbency of frigid nightfall. After roughly three-and-a-half decades in the humming furnace of vim and animation known as Bay Village, there weren’t many prestigeful lineaments emblazoning a stark contrast to its satellite states. The people were as ordinary as any other rotund state. The food was nothing gilt-edged to write home about. Subpar pastries and semi-adequate maritime dishes were a fad that never perished in the bustlesome state. The weather, however, was the solitary exemplary characteristic of Bay Village he’d rave about with ineffable peacockery. 

The summers were spartan. Balmy with the sporadic siege of rainfall, some calamitous while the mammoth aggregate benign and nugatory. Winters were meek. Springs were nary an artful deviant. It was the middle of Fall in his archaic, picturesque town, and his unceasing gratitude recognized no glaring flanges or demarcations. Mornings were icy, afternoons endowed with a downy gelid varnish, nights dowered with sunken mercury treading perilously into the low thirties. Exactly as Mordecai Borders liked it. 

But Mordecai liked a myriad of things and sensations. At least, for all limpid intents and purposes, he thought he did. He excavated his matchless passion from the mountainous dregs of abortive labors and pilgrimages. Carpentry, welding, scuba diving, fishing. He tried it all, and the only attempt that wasn’t consummately bootless was the sophisticated, venerable art of being a pundit of time’s facile rhythms. His heart was satisfied. He sowed enough seeds to reap the most voluptuous bounties of palatable fruits for the remainder of his unremarkable sojourn on the globe. Yet his onerous soul shrieked a different story. 

A grievous fable of lethargy and unremitting drudgery, a ravenous acidic species of boredom that trounced every known meter or scale. One that pummeled the mind of the brunete into egregious submission until he bore no further significance than serving as its vassal. That’s all he was now. A prolific Pandora’s box of ravenous ennui raring with untold vigor to unleash its borderless septic influence upon the Earth’s scraggy countenance. 

He loved being a receptacle for countless orders. The more labyrinthine the request, the deeper he waded in his fathomless craft. An exercise that, in the many years of yester, would yank the ripcord on his ticker to a frenzied ballad of incendiary elation. Dancing behind his ribs, an unblushing partisan to the jubilation. 

Oh, how foolish he was to be an ingrate. 

He descended a few steps backward. Staring hard and fastidious at that photograph, pride emanating from the fleckless glass. His family. Whole and unbroken before meeting the boundless judgement from revelations and altered minds. Perhaps they suffered the same fate he did. Loving to their heart’s content. Floundering in the flaming lakes of zeal that warmed their bones, its flame glistening in their toothy beams. But they discovered all-too-late that love only went so far. That it was a finite resource born to be appreciated and vaulted. Not some mystical unsung chimera to weld people together as one. A lesson they learned at a point Mordecai believed was one of no return, yet that farcical belief was the phantoms in his mirror night after night. When the stars’ redoubtable emissary heralded their arrival and the rattling song of crickets, accompanied by the unpredictable whoop of a gallant owl, they were all that stood beside him. The ruthless ghosts of what was. Forlorn ghouls of what could’ve been and what never could be. 

He wiped a thumb across his shining visage. His digit threatening to leave a bubbling path of envy where it trod. How young he was back then. Only thirty-one. The dichotomy evermore-apparent in the dolorous reflection. Eyebags darkening. Wrinkles graven into his forehead. Features hanging low and mournful like the spectator of a touted hanging that found no enrichment in the brutality. 

“Where the hell did I go wrong…?” He muttered low, quieter than the nomadic gales galloping down the streets of Bay Village. Mordecai pressed a thumb to his son’s visage. “What’re we gonna do, Oscar?”

He breathed deep and reset the framed photo. Straight as humanly possible and, following an overdrawn sorrowful stare, he retired to his bedroom. 

His righteous judgement was fated for sunrise.

Author's Note

This is gonna be my first novel that I intend to publish so any all feedback is appreciated?

Reviews

[JayG]

• "This is gonna be my first novel that I intend to publish so any all feedback is appreciated?"

Unfortunately, my news isn’t good. So take a deep breath.

• Mordecai Borders had become a scrupulous master of time during his tenure on Earth’s many cragged faces, yet not in the manner that most might think.

I give up. Who or what is, Mordecai Borders? What's a "master of time?" Why would he spend his time rock-climbing? Where are we in time and space? And, how do you know what I "might think?"

In reality, my thinking was: why are YOU talking ABOUT him instead of placing the reader into a scene where something interesting is happening? Why are you telling instead of showing?

You’ve fallen into the most common trap for the hopeful writer, and like the vast majority of hopeful writers, have done so because of several common misunderstandings.

1. The goal of fiction isn’t to make the reader know the story. In fact, plot is way down in importance. If the writing doesn’t grab the reader and make them NEED to know what happens next in less than three pages, they’ll turn away and never learn what the plot is.

2. The only writing skills we’re given in school are the ones employers need us to know, like how to write reports, letters, and other NONFICTION writing. And the goal of nonfiction is to inform. Its approach is to report and explain, which is precisely what you do, start to finish. And that's as exciting as reading any report.

3. We CANNOT transcribe ourselves as if telling the reader a story, because storytelling is a performance art, where how you tell the story matters as much as what you say. When you read it, the narrator’s voice is alive with emotion, because it’s your voice. For the reader? A text-to-speech voice, like the one you’ll hear if you have the computer read it to you.

So...no, you’re not ready for publication. Remember, they’ve been expanding and polishing the skills of fiction for centuries. Learn them and you’ll pull the reader in, and, avoid the traps. Skip that, and...

Bottom line: To write fiction, even for hobby writing, you need the skills of the profession, because nothing else works. They’re not hard to find or understanding, though mastering them isn’t like reading a list of, “Don’t do that...do this instead. It is, after all, a profession.

But the learning is interesting, and the practice is writing, so what’s not to love?

Try this: Grab a copy of Dwight Swain’s, Techniques of the Selling Writer. It's the best I've found to date at imparting and clarifying the "nuts-and-bolts" issues of creating a scene that will sing to the reader.

https://dokumen.pub/techniques-of-the-selling-writer-0806111917.html

Jay Greenstein

Articles: https://jaygreenstein.wordpress.com/category/the-craft-of-writing/the-grumpy-old-writing-coach/
Videos: https://www.youtube.com/@jaygreenstein3334

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“Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader. Not the fact that it’s raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.”
~ E. L. Doctorow

“In sum, if you want to improve your chances of publication, keep your story visible on stage and yourself mum.”
~ Sol Stein

“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
~ Mark Twain

[Davidgeo]

Fortunately, nobody takes your AI generated reviews seriously

[JayG]

Look in the mirror, moron.

At least I have intelligence.

[Davidgeo]

Jay, little buddy, it's sad the delusion you've fallen into at this stage of your life. It really magnifies your personality disorder. You have these delusions of grandeur that do not line up with actual reality but you don't seem to realize it, I thought it was just a troll job but now I see that you simply don't have self awareness. Maybe you should look into what that could mean... they are very telling signs of a pretty serious type of personality disorder. It's never too late for therapy Jay.