The Unpainted Day
by Z. Marlow
3 min readI carry Elsie down from the clock room while my husband sets the hands moving again.
She is asleep against my shoulder, warm and heavy, with blue paint beneath one thumbnail. Her shoes knock softly against the iron stair. Below us, kettles begin to whistle across Bellwether Square. A cart horse stamps. Someone opens the bakery shutters, releasing the smell of flour and scorched raisins.
It is Wednesday morning.
At home I put Elsie to bed, though she protests that she has already slept enough. My husband washes the brushes in a jam jar. The water clouds blue, then grey.
Neither of us mentions the people waking in doorways, or the milk standing sour on steps. We do not mention the schoolmistress found asleep at her desk with Tuesday's sums still on the board.
We have learned that a day can pass without being kept.
Before the paint dried, Elsie held the lamp while my husband copied the letters onto the brass wheel.
WEDNESDAY
His hand shook only once. The second E had a thicker middle stroke than the others. It remains so.
When the last letter was finished, the great clock gave a small sound, not a chime, but the click a tongue makes before speaking.
Far below, the square exhaled.
Pigeons dropped from the rooftops and caught themselves in the air. The baker sat up beside his cold ovens. All along Chapel Row, curtains opened upon a darkness that had lasted since breakfast.
Elsie looked through the clockface.
“They were waiting,” she said.
She did not say what for.
Before my husband found the paint, we searched the town.
Nothing had stopped. The river moved beneath the bridge. Smoke leaned from chimneys. The clock hands travelled with their usual patient scrape.
Only the people slept.
They slept in beds, in chairs, over washing tubs. Mr Fane slept standing at his shop counter, one hand cupped for a customer's coins. Babies breathed quietly in their cots. Dogs would not bark, though they watched us pass.
Elsie was missing.
I found one of her shoes on the tower stair and the other beneath the pendulum. Above it, the weekday wheel had turned to a blank brass panel.
There should have been a word there.
The town had not misplaced Wednesday. Wednesday was all around us, vast and unlit, and no one but those inside the clock could remain awake in it.
Then we heard Elsie tapping from behind the wheel.
Before we climbed the tower, I went to wake her for school.
Her bed was empty but still warm. On the kitchen table lay six little paper labels she had made the evening before: Monday through Sunday, with one omitted. She had used blue pencil and trimmed each label neatly with my sewing scissors.
The bread had not risen. The fire had not gone out. Outside, the same strip of dawn lay over the roofs for what seemed like hours.
My husband came in from winding the clock and asked why every calendar in the square showed Tuesday beside Thursday.
That was when I remembered the rag in his pocket.
Before dawn, he had cleaned the weekday wheel.
The old paint was flaking, so he rubbed each panel with lamp oil and a scrap of linen. Monday brightened. Tuesday brightened.
When he reached Wednesday, Elsie called from the stairwell that breakfast was ready.
He left the oily rag folded against the word.
The evening before, Elsie sat at our kitchen table making labels for her school copybook.
My husband watched her form the letters with her tongue caught between her teeth. Outside, the clock struck nine, and its sound travelled through the pipes and fireplaces of the town.
Elsie looked up.
“Do the words tell the clock what day it is,” she asked, “or does the clock tell the words?”
My husband said it made no difference.
Then the clock struck once more.
