The sheet slide cool across her bare legs, like sand sifting against her skin. She thinks of this bed as her living hourglass, and time melts away over her, draping like a blanket over her all the moments that slipped out of her reach.
Her memories crumble in her heart and her hand presses to her breast, trying to keep her past from spilling out. She hasn't the time to clean up an atomic spill of childhood recollections.
Moonlight tilts her bedroom sideways, and she finds she is sliding across herself, grasping to hold on. She cannot fall. There is too much to be done in regaining balance. There is no time for that.
Her eyes burn with the light of the darkness, and she stares into nothing, her ceiling swaying as her fingers knot in her pillowcase. Is there time inside the clock? She wonders, as she watches herself the pendulum swing. Is there time left here when it is well-spent elsewhere?
A red flower blooms against her inky blindness, and the clock clicks, her heart chiming the hour. Her bedroom is only a bedroom, she compromises, curling her arms – only arms, not hands to tick away her life – around the small boy that has crawled into the blankets beside her.
The sand in her hourglass still slides hissing away.
She has time enough.