Hourglasses

This story is © copyrighted to Adrienne Wolter in 2005 and onwards. It was written on Wednesday, February 16th, 2005. Do not take this story.

This story is a work of fiction. It was originally intended as a writing exercise just to get back into writing, but I'm rather proud of it.

This story was published in the 2004-2005 copy of Pandora's Box, my school's literary magazine. It had a picture I drew of a broken hourglass in the background.

I entered this story into the short short story category of the 2005-6 Scholastic Writing Awards. It won a gold key, and hopefully will do well in nationals.

Hourglasses

Welcome, they had told her, with outstretched arms. She had come here... oh, she forgot how long ago. Time seemed so pointless here, so endless. When you are in charge of others’ time, sometimes you lose track of it yourself. It must not have been that long ago... it felt like yesterday, and yet it felt like years ago. It was all so irrelevant here.
Shelves and shelves of hourglasses. That was all that the untrained eye would see. They littered the storage hall, in no particular order, yet you could always find the ones that were running out of sand. They jumped out at you, somehow; the ones you kept your eyes on were those which had so little time left to keep. Soon they would run out, and be plucked off the shelf, to be refilled and relabelled and replaced. It had all been so interesting to her at first, how every single person had an hourglass, how some were large and some were small and in some, the sand fell faster than others. Every hourglass was different, and yet now when she gazed upon the shelves, all she saw were hourglasses.
No one ever spoke here; there was no need. Anything that ever had to be communicated was done silently, through a nod or a gesture. She had felt lonely at first, and when she looked at the others all she saw were people so much older than herself. She was the youngest one; she had come here at a mere eighteen years of age, if she recalled. Not that it mattered now. They had all looked different then, and while they had no names she could tell them apart by their hair color, and occasionally by their facial features. Now it felt like long ago, she supposed, for now they all looked exactly the same.
No need for individuality here. That wasn’t a job requirement.
She had very few memories left of before; before she had come to be here, working tirelessly forever, reshelving hourglasses. There had been other people, and they all looked different. Not like here. There was talking, and laughing, and singing. Yes, those were the things she decided she had missed most. And there were some memories she didn’t understand anymore. They had had some meaning at one point. A cat. She’d forgotten its name. Being behind the steering wheel of a car, not quite sober, laughing with a friend after a party. Driving, oh, she missed a few stoplights, and hadn’t really seen the truck that was coming from the highway... she remembered nothing after that.
Her eyes caught an hourglass and she was torn from her musing. The last three grains of sand fell, one by one, as though trying to hold on; the final one fell and she picked it off the shelf, pouring the sand into the bucket at her feet and scooping new sand into this newly opened side. Then she wrote a new name on the base and set it back down. There was the birth of a new child, ready to greet the world. She had given it a lot of sand, as much as she could fit into the hourglass. She tried to do that with every hourglass, when no one else was paying attention. Everyone deserved time. But when the others watched, she put on her indifferent face and scooped without looking at the sand, not quite filling the glass.
It must have scared her at first, the idea that she was controlling others’ lives. Of course, it probably didn’t really scare her until she realized that that was what was going on; but pretty soon she had figured it out. She could remember with shame, the first and only time she had tried to voice a question; the first four words escaped her mouth, and it echoed. Echoed off every shelf, bounced off every hourglass, down the endless hallway. And they had all looked up at her, stared, all those sets of differently-colored eyes boring into hers. And eventually the sound died, and she knew that speaking was not natural here.
She knew that if they had stared at her again, she would only see the same eyes, the same hair, the same people. Everything here was identical.
Another hourglass, further down the row, was reaching its end. She picked it up when it was done and poured the sand out. Oh, how she wished she could put herself back into an hourglass. But the shame–they must not find out. The shame, if they knew that one of their own was thinking. Thinking was something that made one different; thinking was an activity of individuality and she must not let them know that she could still do it.
It would be so easy, to give up thinking, of course. But no matter how much of her wanted to conform to the thoughtless copies every other worker here was, a small part still wouldn’t let go.
And it was then that the glass slipped from her fingers and shattered on the floor. Oh, she had never noticed what the floor looked like before. It was tiled, with white tiles. The same white as the walls, and the shelves, and–
The glass glittered from movement; she looked up at one of the others. No, she couldn’t distinguish anyone, she found, looking at the rows of people who had stopped to look up at her. There was no one here. Just many. A hundred pairs of colorless eyes, a hundred heads of colorless hair. They might as well be transparent.
The sound from the shatter was still bouncing, faintly. Everyone had winced together when it had first fallen. The same action, repeated a hundred times around her.
You are thinking, said the one who had stepped forward, silently.
I’m sorry, she said, backing up a half a step and looking down into the shards of glass in shame.
You have destroyed a soul, it said. There is one less hourglass to use. Which child will be born dead?
I’m sorry, she said.
Go. And she looked the way it gestured, noticing a door at the very end of the hallway that she had never noticed before. She had never known the corridor to have ends. So she took a step, over the broken pieces of glass, and took another, past the one who had spoken to her wordlessly. Many more steps, past many more blank faces. And then she was in front of the door.
The doorknob was cold. She turned it, and opened it to sunshine.
Memories crashed back into her head. Names, sounds, faces, songs. She stumbled for a moment, staring out into the world.
Then she took a step, and felt sand beneath her feet.
She looked down. Sand.
Was it here? Was this her chance to try again? Could she have an hourglass now? And looking back into the hallway, she saw a hundred different faces, a hundred differently-colored pairs of eyes. And she knew.
Thank you, she told them, and closed the door.