Half an Hour Glass
by Audrey Greathouse
Part 1 appears in this issue.
conclusion
Sibyl stood up and shuffled through a box on one of her shelves, pulling out a round, flat mirror, and a glass vial full of something white and granular.
She set the mirror down between us all, and for a moment I thought she was about to pour out a line of coke. Sybil’s glass, however, was only an hourglass filled with a coarse, bleached sand. She set it carefully on the mirror and began unscrewing the top of the container as the sand drained to the bottom.
“This will take a little blood, of course. A few drops.”
Sandra tensed, and I watched as Sybil produced a box full of orange hypodermic needles, individually packaged in plastic.
“Sterilized, single-use, all that jazz,” she tiredly assured us. “Let me see your hands.”
I reached my hand out first, and Sybil stabbed my wrist and extracted the blood she needed so quickly that she had already removed the needle by the time I flinched. Carefully, she squeezed the syringe into the unscrewed opening of the hourglass and plunged six deliberate drops into the container. I watched my blood slide down the curved glass walls of the hourglass, slipping into the sand below.
Sybil tossed the needle into a plastic garbage pail labeled BIOWASTE in neon sharpie. I hadn’t noticed it among the clutter when we entered. Sybil opened another needle for squeamish Sandra, although I couldn’t imagine why. If either of us had anything dangerous in our blood, a shared hypodermic needle was the least of our worries.
Sandra looked away as Sybil’s expert hands drew the same amount of blood out of her wrist. I wondered how old this woman really was and if the glamors and youthful enchantments attributed to witchcraft might have merely lost out against the detrimental effects of a furious drug habit.
Sandra did not perceive that the needle had left her wrist, her hand quaking and ring shaking. “It’s over,” I whispered. Sandra brought her gaze back, pulled her hand into her lap.
“Oh... I’m sorry,” Sybil apologized. She clunked a small, colorful cardboard box down between us. “Band-aids.”
They had Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on them. Sandra and I wrapped our wrists, and I wondered if the sleepy, terminal little girl from earlier had appreciated this detail.
Six drops of Sandra’s blood now joined with mine in the hourglass, and Sybil screwed on its glass top tight. She shook the hourglass, brushing the sand against every streak of blood on the glass’s interior. The sand, in its strange nature, seemed to absorb the blood, neither sticking to the hourglass nor clotting together. A faint red residue colored the crystals but, as it shook, those few colored grains diffused among the rest of the sand, disappearing entirely. Sybil handed it to us.
“You,” she told me, “will hold the bottom in one hand.” To Sandra: “You will hold the top with one hand. Together, keep it balanced.”
“Why do I hold the top?” Sandra asked.
“No questions,” Sibyl answered. “When I signal you, hold it just like this. You will continue, until I hold my hand up. Then, you turn it sideways and stop the flow immediately. Timing is very important.”
The dance club next door switched to a song that reverberated powerfully but almost silently through the wall. I could feel the beat of the song in my feet, planted on the floor, and it seemed more real than the heartbeat pulsing through my ears and throat.
Sybil reached over to old black boombox on the nearest shelf of the small room. A shrill hum followed as she mechanically rewound the cassette tape inside. My feeling of temporal dissonance began to overshadow my awe for Sybil’s purported witchcraft.
Her lime-green nails clicked against the machine as she played the tape from the start. I recognized the song by tune but not by name: some old, solitary hit from a faceless and forgotten rockstar. Sitting through this exceedingly trivial pop song seemed almost as absurd as my inability to name the title or artist, even as I started to recall scraps of lyrics and anticipate the melody of a chorus I couldn’t remember. I expected the approaching chorus to spark my memory, but as the music built to that transition, Sybil queued us to flip the hourglass and start the sand descending. With her other hand, she struck a button to launch the tape into cacophonous reverse.
All semblance of song stripped away, the noise became like wind whipping through a car window. Occasional inverted cymbal crashes struck, and a disjointed series of chords all faded into existence before springing back away. I watched the sand streaming down through the hourglass and felt an envy blended with intrigue. Symbols carried such simplicity. The sand fell easily, uninterrupted, and undisturbed. I did not expect the life it reallotted to move anywhere near as smoothly.
Amid the disharmony of the reversed instrumentation, the poppy, bright words of the song returned, slurred and sharp, in backward and demonic imitations of themselves. Sybil chanted along with them, her slurred voice suiting the sound.
With a sudden, snake-like spring forward, Sibyl raised her hand, compelling us to tip the hourglass sideways. As close as my eye could tell, we had allowed the hourglass to empty exactly half of its sand. Our nervousness shook but did not compromise our hands, and Sandra and I gripped opposite ends of the glass, freezing its understanding of time over the mirror.
So concerned we might break it, we didn’t take our eyes off the hourglass. We didn’t see the small metal mallet in Sybil’s hand until she brought it down against the fragile bottleneck in the middle of the glass. Sandra screamed when she heard the crash and felt the glass crumble out of our shared hold. As the sand gushed out of the broken hourglass and down onto the surface of the mirror, every white grain became an immaculate blood red.
The cassette had unwound its length of tape, and the boombox had clicked off somewhere during the crash and scream. I marveled at the red sand, half-wanting to find the mechanism for this trick, half-wanting to surrender to the strange sensation of placing my destiny in a handful of sand.
Sandra laughed, once, to expel her nervousness in the guise of disbelief or amusement.
“I have done what I do,” Sybil announced, standing up from her seat. “You have what you came for.”
“That’s it?” I asked.
“That is it.”
I felt no difference. A lingering awe left me wired to search for unusual stimulus, but I heard the muffled noises of the throbbing of the dance club and angry voices in the convenience store. We’d wanted a simple miracle though, something without impact on our young lives. The magic was either sublime in its ethereal initiation, or an utter scam.
Sybil waved us away, the grand gesture akin to the one she had introduced herself with. But now, she looked despondent. “You have what you came for,” she repeated, her eyes meeting mine with a dead gaze. “You can go now.”
“Thank you for—”
Sybil cut Sandra off. “You’re welcome.”
I thanked her too, but she did not respond.
As we carefully stepped out of Sybil’s unearthly laboratory, I saw her dig into her cavernous purse and pull out dull silver flask. She pulled a disconsolate swig from it with her bright, melting lips.
I closed the door as we squeezed back through the entrance. No one was waiting after us, and once again we were sandwiched between the pulsing techno and sound of the convenience store door slamming like a gunshot.
“I don’t think that was real,” Sandra announced. “Do you? I feel like it wasn’t. That woman seemed crazy.”
“What did you expect?” I, too, had my doubts, but something compelled me not to voice them. Sandra’s doubts became more convicted with every word.
“What was that thing with the sand turning red? I don’t think it was that impressive. What do they call that? Parlor tricks? I think I saw a magician do the same thing once, just with water, not sand.” She tried to fidget with her ring again, but her hand must have swelled. The clammy warmth of anxiety had displaced her chill of nervousness. The ring did not budge on her finger.
She walked ahead of me — we had to file out one at a time — and as we stepped out of Sybil’s shop, the convenience store door slammed once more like a gunshot. But the door into the store didn’t move.
My mind jerked through thoughts with the swiftness of adrenaline. “Sandra—”
I reached for her as I stepped back, back toward the perceived safety of Sybil’s shop, but Sandra did not comprehend, and did not break the pace of the step she was still taking.
Her head turned toward the noise, and she stalled in confusion when a short, furious man burst out of the store, clutching a misshapen duffel bag.
Sandra saw his ski mask and screamed before I even saw the gun in his hand.
I grabbed her and pulled her away, but the gesture was both too late and unnecessary. The robber’s dangerous and persecuted instinct moved faster than either of us could. He fired at her twice; once when he heard her screaming at him, and once when he realized his gun had jammed.
I tried to throw us back into the shop, but the door had locked behind us. It didn’t matter. A moment’s reflection showed the robber he had nothing to fear from us. Running past us, he disappeared into the urban jaws of the night.
Quiet seconds passed, engulfing everything but our drumming hearts and deep, unsettled breaths.
“Oh my God!” Sandra muttered. “That was... that was close.” Her attention turned to the convenience store, and she voiced a timid fear for whoever had been working the counter.
As her shaking voice proposed we check the store, call the cops, try to help... I stood by. The feeling of my blood churning through me like concrete, like sand, paralyzed me. I felt my blood as it shifted me into a life that was now half as long as it had been half an hour ago.
Copyright © 2022 by Audrey Greathouse
