A/N: Wow, TWO things from me in TWO days? What is this? Actually, this is my final project for my creative writing class. I’m vaguely fond of it, and just wanted to archive it somewhere so it doesn’t get lost in the multitudes of floating word documents on my hard drive. OH MY GOD, IT ISN’T SLASH. (That’s because I had to turn it in to a professor.)

Title: The Minute of an Hour

Author: Alyn Drasil

Rating: PG (o so tame)

Disclaimer: Still mine.

Warnings: Oh, I don’t know…implied PILLS?

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12:16. It’s the longest minute of his life.

He stands where gritty sand translates into rough wood and scuffs at the pier with a sneaker. Pebbles kick away down the splintered pier and tumble into the low tide, pulled out around barnacle-slathered pylons. Damp wind blows the salt air into his nose, and he stares into the hazed, colorless horizon

The seagull. He keeps seeing it. He sees it again now, cawing out its raw cry. It wheels and circles and dips down to the horizon on m-shaped wings, and his pocket starts to trill with an opus of Some Concerto in A Minor. Or maybe it’s B Plus. He fishes for the cell phone and holds it up to his mouth.

“Hello.”

“Go to your appointment!” The voice, female, is burst of righteous annoyance. “Dr. Mignogna called and said you weren’t there. Where are you?”

“Not there.”

“Ha, ha, you’re funny, where are you?”

“Right here.”

“I’m so incredibly serious, go to your appointment. Are you at the beach again? You’re only fifteen minutes late, Dr. Mignogna will hold the slot for you.”

He checks his watch. “Sixteen.”

“What?”

“Sixteen minutes late.”

“Good, so you’re keeping track. Go, or I’m coming to get you.”

“I don’t want to go. The man’s a quack. He’s a doctor of cooked muscle.”

“How many times—it’s not mignon, it’s Mignog—“

He lowers the phone without saying goodbye. He stares out at the ocean, at the blurry line where sea meets sky, and the wind whips at his hair. He clenches the phone at his side.

It’s warm from his face, like a living thing. His grip loosens on it as it wriggles, suddenly slippery in his hand. His fingers release, and it falls flashing, the buttons shining like scales and the antennae thrashes. Flops to the pier, careens on its edge and squirrels through a knothole. There’s the splash of water and he thinks of the sleek silver thing, shimmying down through murky waters, bypassing motes and specks and plankton, whirled up in a school of blue fish. It burrows down through the water, to the safety of the murky bottom below the pier, digging nose-deep in the sand. Can it survive there, he wonders. Or is it a fresh-water phone.

By now his fingers are numb around the phone from the force of his grip. He looks down at it, solid and still, resting in his palm. He releases it into his pocket, carefully. It clanks against the little bottle that also resides there, and he withdraws his hand before he can accidentally touch it.

He checks his watch. 12:16.

He thinks of doctors. Doctors in their white coats with their framed diplomas and laminated posters exhaustively detailing the affects of glaucoma, or whatever. Or maybe that one was in the optometrist. He can’t remember. But he doesn’t like the optometrist either.

He could get a white coat and a diploma and a laminated poster of glaucoma and be a doctor too. If he wanted. Or he could get a suit and slick his hair back and be Cary Grant. He reaches up and brushes his hair off his forehead and rakes it back, but it won’t stay in place. He can’t remember what side of his head Cary Grant parted his hair anyway. He draws out his cell phone again (don’t touch the bottle), one-touches a different number.

“Cary Grant,” he says when he hears breathing on the line, “did he part his hair to the left or the right?”

“I think he parted it both ways, if you know what I mean. Don’t you have an appointment right now? Your sister called me. She seemed angry.”

“I’m busy.”

“Busy doing what? Being Cary Grant? I bet Cary Grant never missed an appointment.”

“I bet Cary Grant wasn’t crazy.”

“Look, she’s going to call in the National Guard to find you if you don’t show up soon. As a friend, I recommend you just go to your appointment already. It’d be easier for everyone.”

“Why don’t you be my doctor? You’ve got a white coat and a diploma. You just need the glaucoma.”

“What? I’m a lab tech. And I don’t have glaucoma”

“Then you’re no help.”

He scowls and jams the phone away in his pocket again. Now he can’t remember—maybe his doctor doesn’t have a white coat. Maybe it’s a couch and some inkblots. Do you see a cute bunny with a carrot or the four horsemen of the apocalypse?

He checks his watch. 12:16.

Bunnies of the apocalypse. That’s a good answer. Even if it’s really a swan and a frog. Tell them something you don’t see.

He bites on a hangnail until it bleeds and sticks the edge of his thumb into his mouth to suck the red away. He hears the gull again but can’t see it; it could be under the dock, right under his feet, sitting there, doing gull things. Whatever those might be.

He bends down, gets to his knees and straddles the knothole in the pier. He peers through the slats. A beady marble eye glares back at him.

Gull, he says to it, are you doing gull things?

Come see, says the gull and rushes with white wings upwards and pulls him along into the sky. Wide white arms spread wings, and they twirl. He sees the see, the sky, switched in place—one blue-grey, one grey-grey, a long strip of brown that’s the pier. Wind whips by and slaps his hair into his face, he squints against the rush of air and hears the flap of feathery wings in his ear. In a spiral they plummet down, twisting and speeding, and water froths up to meet them in a rush, a flurry, a fury.

And he’s kneeling on the dock. Through the knothole he sees foamy grey ocean. Seaweed lurks under the surface, green and shining. His knees ache a little, the wood grinds against his kneecaps. There’s a single hair caught on a splinter, rippling in the breeze. White and long, like unicorn hair. He has white hairs of his own. He knows because she says he’ll be grey by thirty.

Concerto in C Minus rings again.

“I’m coming to get you,” she says when he picks up. “You’re at the beach again, aren’t you?”

“No.”

“Yes, you are, I hear seagulls. Stay there. I mean it.”

He puts the phone away again. Looks up at the sky. The gull wheels and calls.

“Traitor,” he says. The gull screams.

He checks his watch. 12:16.

He reaches into the formless pocket of his sweatshirt and draws out a crumpled cartoon. It shakes with a hollow, papery sound as things shift inside. Stolen from his sister’s house. Or maybe his house too—he lives there after all. He rolls the cartoon around in his palms and mouths the lettering backwards and forwards—S-M-I-L-S-L-I-M-S. Virginia. Girl or place.

The crumpled flap flips open and white tubes spin into the air. Each erupts with a flutter, sprouting paper gossamer shreds. The tubes buzz into the air, paper wings fluttering, dipping erratically in the salt air. One bobs in front of his nose, whirring briskly and riding the air. Nicotine filter eyes. He feels the others brush past his arms and legs, dallying on another plane of air. They pluck at his sweatshirt and hum with sound, and his lifts his hands, palms flat. A few alight there, pricks of feeling but no weight. He grins watching them, flicking their paper shreds. Then, suddenly, they drop.

The cigarettes lie spilled across the pier. He stares at them, rolling a little in the breeze. Quiet, and unalive. He gets to his knees to retrieve them. Some fall between the slats and even his thin fingers can’t pick them out. He packs them back into the carton and puts the carton back in his sweatshirt. He keeps one hand folded over it, squeezing the worn cardboard.

With the other hand, he checks his watch. 12:16.

There’s a rattle in his pocket. The pills. They shake with each movement he makes, in their little orange-gold cylinder. He can see them in his mind, little white tubes, just like the cigarettes. Only smaller. He slides one finger into his pocket—two. Touches the tip of the cylinder’s top. It’s beveled and smooth with little ridges. Scissoring it between two fingers, he lifts the bottle out.

The little pills crawl together like bugs, mashing up against the plastic. He peers in at them, at their little world. Gold-tinted. It wouldn’t be nice to disturb them. Happy little colony of pills. He pops the top off anyway, picks one out. The weakest of the herd. Its prescribed death should have come sixteen minutes ago. Same time as the appointment. As the doctor, as the inkblot, as Cary Grant.

It flicks away, out of his fingers, dives into the water. No splash, only a ripple. The top goes back on the bottle.

A car door slams. He glances up, a bright yellow shape in his vision a new addition to the grey, grey scenery. A girl is there, besides it. She raises an arm above her head, waves it. Calls his name. Starts coming down towards the pier.

She looks exactly like him. Except that her hair is wishy blonde and his is brown, he’s taller, she wears earrings, he wears glasses, her eyes are bigger, his nose is thinner—maybe they don’t look anything alike at all.

She yells, calling his name again as she jogs forward to reach the pier. The yellow car idles in the background, jugging and puffing steam into the air. He watches the whiteness curl into the air, fading into the grey. Steam from an ancient dragon’s nostrils. The purr becomes a rumble, a low deep growl. It—

Hands seize his arms, spin him to look into a face curtained by fluffy blond hair.

“Hey,” she says, “hey, are you all right?”

“I’m fine.”

She looks him up and down, she sees the bottle in his hand. “Did you take them?”

“Where?”

“Take them!” She thrusts her fingers at her mouth.

“Oh. Sure.”

She relaxes, a little, not much. The she peers at him. “Have you been….seeing, anything?”

“Just fish and seagulls and insects.”

She sighs. “Good.”

“I see you right now.”

“Yes, but I’m always real.”

“Are you?”

She grabs bunches of her dishwatery hair and clumps them back behind her ears. The wind fluffs it out again, and she looks at him through the stands. She touches his arm.

“You know…it’s all fixable. Everything—all this stuff you see.”

“It doesn’t need to be fixed. I’m not broken.”

She takes his arm. “Come on.”

He tries to pull away.

“Your appointment is thoroughly missed, don’t worry. I’m taking you home.”

“Where’s the car?”

“The shop—don’t you remember? I had to take a taxi to work. How did you get here?”

“Bus, I think. Maybe seagull.”

“Seagull bus line? Never heard of that one. Oh, and Brenda said you called her. Something about glaucoma. Do your eyes hurt?” She puts a hand on his face.

He grins. “No.”

“Good. All right.” She takes her arm, links it into his. Pulls him close up against her.

He checks his watch. 12:16.

“What time is it?”

She’s still walking him along, their arms linked. “Past one.”

Oh. His watch has stopped.

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I’m actually not even sure where this came from. But it was fun.