My death would be the prettiest surprise.
She can hear the clock again.
She can hear the wheels and the metal, the scratchy and unkind sound that winds up repeating for another thousand time. It never changes, spins again and again. Each splinter it gets, each rust spot it grows, it ignores. The clock continues to tick, the wheels continue to spin and the sound continues to grow and grow. It grows closer each year, the opposite to the moon, he who shines just white and small, he who smiles only half and he who is just another sun, he who leaves the earth just a little bit each year. The clock, the ticking, it grows uncomfortably close, like weed at the flooded corner of the street. The sun who will grow and the moon who will shine, but she will only hear the clock.
Each day she hears the rusty wheels, hears the sound of metal grinding against each other. Throughout sleepless nights she can imagine the mad clock ticking, sees the red from the rust and the bending of the metal wheels. It is a clockwork, her life, just as rusty and red as the clock and the ticking she tries to sleep through. A constant plucking of her hair strands, just to replace them with the midnight moon that will color her hair. She tries to hide the gray, the stress that makes a promise to show through a bottle of black hair dye. She tries only weeks later, with black stained hands and a framed face. She wears the paint and dye, a midnight black she hides from.
She doesn't bother with gloves.
The midnight black, the midnight silver she tries to hide like a deadman's case, comes with damage and broken things. Broken hair strands, broken nails and broken nights. She tries wigs the next day, and they do nothing to her situation. Her work is usually impeccable, neat and without a loose thread. She is careful with her handiwork, with the sowing she practices late into the night, later after midnight, as black bleeds into orange and a girlish pink.
But wigs, without knowledge nor friends to help, are as impossible to solve as the zodiac murders.
It's then when she hears the birds, the blue jays she swears that know her. She hears sparrows, American robins and the occasional common starling. If Gotham was kinder to the beings that called it their home, maybe she would see the same birds each day, each early morning that she was always awake at. Birds that reside in Gotham never stay long. They chirp on a Tuesday in the morning, but later, in the peak of midnight, when she stands in front of her bathroom mirror, they fall to the hungry mouths of predators.
But today, today was Friday, or it would be in far less than twenty minutes. She washed her hands, something alike to hair dye clinging to her hands and face, and she hears the clock again. Neat little boxes, neat little wheels. She hears the tick, tick, tick, the almost silent sound that has driven not one except her to an unknown madness. She swears it had stopped once, once in a lifetime when a blue jay sang to her in the middle of a park. The ducks swam away, but the blue jay stayed. It sang a pretty song, one she never heard again. Pretty birds who sing ballads don't last, don't survive. Gotham is not kind, but the birds still are.
The sink, the white marble sink that has small cracks at the bottom of the curve, just a few centimeters beneath where she was gripping, was smeared. The water tap drips. It would be a nice alternative to the ticking of the time, but it has yet to overthrow the tell of time. The soft splatter of water, oh how she wished it would overflow and drown her in silence. Should she drown in actuality to be granted peace, it wouldn't matter. The wish for eternal silence was bigger than the drive for life.
The image that stares back looks haunted, framed by the small growth of midnight silver. Fake. It looks fake, cheap and gross in quality. It makes her angry, makes her feel old and robbed of young adulthood. She wants her black hair back, the money she has spent on hair dye. She wants it all back. The hats and the spray used for roots that she now uses for her little seed of silver, she hates them. They remind her that she is a liar. A flower that she feeds with lies grows around her heart. It curls and squeezes like a snake, only that she would rather suffocate by the hands of a snake, than a street weed that has weaseled into her heart and taken roots.
