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.