We’re nearing the midnight hour.

                The witching hour.  That eerie moment caught between peace and terror.  Our bodies are simultaneously at rest, pressing the last of the day’s energy down into mattresses or floors, and at alert, flinching with every snap of a twig, every whisper of a spider’s legs across a windowsill.

                Time has spent its last go round the face manipulating us with ease and amusement, as He’s always so want to do.  He slowed to a crawl between the roman III and IV.  We stared at the thin ticking second for what had to have been hours and somehow the movement was so miniscule we couldn’t even notice it with a  squint.  And then suddenly we were already pointing decisively down at the six.

                The six.  The most terrifying moment of them all.  Halfway between start and finish: the quiet, spectral valley between fall and rise.  One more second passes, and there’s no going back up that curve we’ve just ridden down.  Only forward motion which, when cut in half becomes so much more deliberate, decisive.  The hand becomes a knife, slicing through the mire that we might pass with more ease and speed, whether we’d like to or not.

                But for that whole minute, before such a transformation, the longest hand just hangs straight down uselessly, succumbing to the gravity.

                The climb back up took work.  Like the batteries were running dry. Like we needed to be wound.  It turned into a race with the wall clock and the grandfather with his lazily swinging pendulum and everybody’s wristwatch, even though they were all probably set wrong.

                The closer we got to the highest point, that regal twelve, the more clear it became where the real work, the true fear, was coming from.

                We knew all along that the moment was going to arrive, whether it sped near dizzyingly, or dragged slowly closer, taunting.  But it was always going to come.  The cycle would be complete.

                Maybe we were letting it drag on purpose.  Maybe we were attaching our eyes to the passing minutes to encourage their sluggishness.  Maybe we hoped for a breakdown of the mechanism, an essential part to spring loose.

                Because what happens after midnight?

                When those hands make their rounds again, will it look the same?  Will the fall and rise feel just as good?