On her first day on the job, she noticed that the two grandfather clocks she could not try to locate yet could hear chime throughout each corner of the house were both too slow. The one in a room somewhere ahead of her sang the hour eight minutes past, and the one that lived behind her rang six. She thought this added yet another layer of character to the old house, especially since, after the tightening and rewinding of the gears, the faces still refused to speed their hands.
Kim was a letter-writer, a self-acclaimed title that seemed fitting for such a place. Time moved slowly here, in the big yellow house where the river forks. Whether this be because the place was timeless and the job required you remember that, because it’s clocks are simply old and not as useful as they used to be, or, maybe, because of the lack of conversations with real people, allowing more air time for those she kept inside her head. She didn’t really know, she thought, as she circled back and forth from library to dining room, dining room to veranda, veranda to library. Like clockwork, sometimes moving a bit too slow.
She used to be a busy person. She missed it at times, not realizing it was simply the few extra breaths that she was not accustomed to. Over these past few years she had forgotten what it had meant to slow down, forgotten what it was like to finish a book without months between sittings, what it was like to be in tune with herself again.
This was why she loved her job. Cataloging and moving and delving into boxes and boxes of forgotten words. I’m saving them, she would think. Saving these lifetimes, these stories and people from their moldy, water-damaged cardboards that would have become their graves. She enjoyed the distraction from her own thoughts, her own ghosts. Walking up the carpeted stairs to the library’s creaky, large-pane door where, through its stuffiness, she could breathe in the sweet aroma of age. She loved the freedom allowing her to organize the shelves in which ever way she pleased, grouping mystery and romance and poetry in places they would never be lonely or hidden in the dark. Her favourite thing, however, was reading the inscriptions inside the books. Tracing her finger where the ink had lovingly marked the page, as someone from long ago had. She found herself sometimes envious of these people who weighted thoughts like the goldsmith weighted his wares.
One Tuesday morning, after sifting through a large box of play scripts and prose, she happened upon a small, lined journal. Near bouncing with excitement, she tenderly opened its covers to find that its pages were blank, but pressed in between were letters. Love letters, she soon discovered, between a man and a woman who lived far apart.
” I yearn for you much like the waves yearn the shore, or the river yearns the sea. ” she traced the pointed nib strokes, ” And much like the sea, I long for you to be within my sight, wherever I go.”
“Look at this!” she said to her coworker, an older woman who cooked breakfast, cleaned rooms. She was hanging billowing white sheets out to dry in the wind and the sun.
She looked at the scrawled words and, with a humoured-air, handed them back to her.
“Don’t go chasing ghosts now,” she said. “They’re not looking to be missed.”
“I’m not chasing.”
“Are you sure about that?”
“They’re just letters.”
“To you, maybe.” she said. “But to them, they were probably their whole world.”
“Sounds lonely.”
“Mm-hm.”
She placed the letters back in their home and tried to forget, but she found her mind wandering while she worked. She couldn’t help but be drawn to the emotions of passion, want, and torment that were bound to the folded crease. Lines of desire she could not only relate to, but felt as if they could have been once written by herself.
Work changed after that. She was never one to believe in ghosts, but in the days following she found it difficult to decide what was footsteps on creaky floorboards and what was merely the wind. The ideas of these people followed her like an aftertaste that stained her tongue. She was suddenly faced with an unwarranted consumption of thoughts that took root inside her head. Was this because they reminded her so much of her own past? She thought. Or am I going mad in this place?
In an attempt to silence her thinking, she made herself busy again. What was once casually paced work she turned into high-speed, getting through boxes of books so quickly she began to grow light-headed. She didn’t want to think about this boy and this girl who thought they had fallen in love some time ago, when in reality they did not know they were confusing love with lustful ideas that soon became toxic. Thinking about these things caused an introspection she struggled to shut down.
“I feel like I’ve lived this life before. Like I’ve been these people. She found herself writing. “Maybe I feel this way because I have lived through what they have written about. Human situations never really change as time does, do they?
I wanted you to let me go, as I have for you. To be honest, I don’t know if you have, but your ghost follows me, lingering around corners, in books, pressed against my shoulder.
Who knew something dead could get so attached?
All is well here, and I wish you the best.
-Kimberley.
P. S. Please, let me go.”
Rotted Apple 