It was a little after 6am according to my cuckoo clock. That's what it means when the wooden bird with the broken beak comes springing forward and makes a violent jerking motion with his head like he's struggling to breathe 6 times. A noise used to come out of its antique, shattered beak, but I would awake with every caw, on the hour. And since I can't afford to lose any more sleep than I already do, I decided I would operate on the clock, and I dismantled its noise-box. In the process, I broke his nose. I couldn't get rid of clock because I bought it out of pity (and a little bit of charm) from a homeless man a few years ago who I saw every day on my way to the grocery store, and he would ask about it EVERY time I walked by him after that. "How's the bird workin out for ya's?" he would ask, "ya knows, if yous move to the east coast yous gotta reach in them bird guts like you're deliverin a baby and turn your wrist to the right about 30 degrees to reset that aviatin bastard of a machine…never did like that sombitch. Gives me the creeps, all broken, and cryin like a squished baby when its time on the hours…nevertheless, how IS she"?
I would always just simply reply "She's good", drop him a quarter or a dollar, whatever I had, which was never much, and that was that. But he always asked. Every day. He didn't even take holidays off. It was raining when I saw him get hit by that car. Little tiny Geo Metro, too. Took his right arm, from finger tip to right breast, clean off. The wound was so large that every drop of blood from his grimy, frail body INSTANTLY (I mean within a millisecond) threw itself on the blacktop, and his body, before his brain even realized there wasn't enough blood to USE his brain, turned immediately white. As white as teeth on a cartoon game-show host. No one can survive with no blood, despite how much they use it. So…I kept the clock, out of respect. Or guilt, I suppose.
After the 6th epileptic, silent spasm of the cuckoo, my vision focused immediately back on the box (can I even call it a box anymore? It has more life than I DO!). I usually keep a pretty sharp scalpel that I stole from the doctors office a few years ago in one of my drawers in the kitchen. I have never used it, I just always WISHED there would be a time and a place where someone would say "Chadam, scalpel", and I would hand them a scalpel, and a life would be saved (by someone other than me because I know SHIT about anything medicine-related). I figured if C3PO WAS here, like I wanted him to be, HE would be translating the "weird-box" language into "Chadam, scalpel please…" So it was a good time to pull the scalpel out.
Because the box, regardless of its living qualities, was still shaped like a box, with the same folds and flaps I'm familiar with, the decision as to where to cut it open wasn't hard. So I pressed the scalpel into the middle seam on the top of its surface, where the packaging tape was adhered so haphazardly. As I inserted the blade, I felt a chill rain down on my back from the heavens, and, as I pulled the knife gently toward me, a bellowing, haunting moan leaked out of the gradually growing opening. I could almost SEE the sound, as it moved all of my arm hair 45 degrees during its run. Before I even finished with half of the cut, I could see a pulsing light radiating from inside, attempting to escape like the blood of the cuckoo-bum….