Pama Lee Bennett

Grandfather clock at the Brontë Parsonage

Pama Lee Bennett

Each evening at nine, your father said goodnight and walked up the stairs, pausing to wind the grandfather clock on the landing, the clock which chimed your hours, ticking away the precious minutes of your soon-passing lives. A girl in a red dress is painted above the numerals. Did she hear your childish shouts and see your imaginative sword fights? Did she watch each of you pass by, again and again, almost blinded by the flash of your genius, so that she had to turn aside slightly? Did she watch you leave and return, did she see the flow and final ebbs of your lives?

And the clock ticked loudly in your silence, Charlotte, in that terrible year when the others had died, the ticking, ticking almost driving you mad each night after your father had wound the clock and gone up to bed,

and still the clock is ticking, and the girl watches us also come and go from the rooms of your house. We pause on the stairs to look at her face and the gold clock hands and the black numerals, and the small wooden door one opens to wind the clock, this clock which is ticking our minutes too, the minutes held in the eyes of the girl in the red dress.

Pama Lee Bennett is a retired speech pathologist living in Sioux City, Iowa, who received a BA in English and an MA in speech pathology from the University of Iowa. She plays in a Renaissance recorder ensemble, and volunteers as an English teacher in Poland. She has previously been published in Bogg, Evening Street Review, and Dash.