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JLM
Paul Radcliffe
Her eyes were a lake at midnight. Reflected in the starlight, the
clocks ran backwards to the day he first saw her. She was a song, and he heard
it on the wind across the years. Sometimes, so faint it was almost unheard. The
meaning could not be mistaken, though the echoes were often lost, repeating
themselves till silence crept back. Time, though, can be a raging gale that
takes everything and throws it down in pieces, and leaves nothing but memory. And
sometimes even that lies shattered. The days and the years, and all that
happened before he found her again, were what he bartered for her absence. But
for him, love had been a lighthouse. They had reached each other. What lay beyond
was uncharted. It would have
been far easier to disregard what he had seen in those eyes. A sadness that had
called to him and that he heard now, heard above the station announcer and the
bustling, anonymous crowds. Love does not attempt persuasion. You know it or
you don’t. It looks at you once. It does not pretend. It calls across the years
and sometimes it sings. He had waited twenty years. And so had she. The train
hissed to a halt. The station clock looked down, a masterpiece of Roman
numerals and ornamental ironwork. As she walked towards him, he glanced upward.
The hands of the clock were moving slowly backward.
Paul
Radcliffe is an Emergency RN. In the past, he worked in an
area where children were sometimes afflicted with sickness of Gothic proportions.
Some are ghosts now. As a child he visited an aunt in a haunted
farmhouse. This explains a lot. Paul has worked in a variety of noisy places
unlikely to be on anyone’s list of holiday destinations.
He is also a highly suggestible subject for any cat requiring
feeding and practicing hypnosis.
Hillary Lyon founded and for 20 years acted as senior editor
for the independent poetry publisher, Subsynchronous
Press. Her horror, speculative fiction, and crime short stories, drabbles, and poems have appeared
in more than 150 publications. She's an SFPA Rhysling Award nominated
poet. Hillary is also the art director for Black Petals.
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