I am hoping that after this story, I'll be back on track for FFF. I went through a minor spat with the English language, and basically couldn't write (or read!) for a week or two. I think we've mended fences, kissed and made-up. Hopefully, anyhow.

The next story is already partially written, and hopefully only a few days away.

Val suggested I write something that is set in the past, since everything else has been either now, or in the near future. I'll give it a think, and see what I come up with.

For this story, I wanted to write something with a bit of a cyberpunk flavour, without betting the reader's head with it. We'll see how successful I was.

---

Time, And the Keeping Thereof

The pawnshop looked less like a store, and more like a neglected room in the home of an eighty year-old pack rat. Stacks of old, wrinkled books and plastic dvd cases everywhere. Boxes full of broken toys. The furniture was probably for sale, but you would have no clue the pieces cost, because they were almost completely buried under junk. Still, this place came highly recommended by Andrew's friend Stevie. If you couldn't find it online or in malls, the Elvis Pawn Shop was your last, best hope. The owners were apparently luddites of a mild sort so their inventory wasn't snatched up on Internet auctions. The place a smell to it, a definite funk that suggested a hamper of old laundry that had been left in a corner and forgotten. Andrew's girlfriend, Sam, had turned up her nose at the odour, and refused to venture any deeper into the place than the front display, where she could get a bit of fresh air. Which was were she stood, looking at the collection of ceramic knifes and plaster lawn gnomes.

"Who even had a lawn anymore?" she'd asked, fascinated.

Andrew was deep in the store at the back counter, haggling with the clerk over the wristwatch laid out on a purple velvet cloth.

"Look, this is the only watch you're going to find around here. Probably the only watch you're going to find on the entire Eastern seaboard."

Andrew waved a hand at it. "It's all cheap looking. Plastic. The last thing I need is more plastic shit."

"If it makes you feel any better, it's genuine petroleum plastic. Not from corn." He pressed one of the buttons on the side of the watch, then frowned. "Well I'm sure the back-lighting stills works. It just needs a fresh battery. You can still check the time and all that. I know a place where you can probably get one."

Andrew wondered if the guy was the store's owner. He looked too young, like he should have still been in school. Andrew had been expecting someone old. Maybe a loupe and one of those visors that bankers and blackjack dealers in videos wore.

"But that's just a digital watch. I wanted something old-fashioned. Like, something that's actually old. Springs and gears and shit. Like you have to wind it up so it keeps time."

"Hey look, it's still an antique. You try to find a digital watch anywhere else. This is the best you're gonna do. If I'd had a real, honest to goodness piece of clockwork, it'd have been sold for metal parts ages ago. Maybe to a private a collector. How would you afforded it anyway?"

Andrew looked down. His clothes were a bit tattered, but he thought the threadbare jeans might even have passed for a style, rather than just old.

"Private ownership of copper isn't even legal anymore."

"I thought it maybe you'd have something tin or stainless steel or something." Any fight had gone out of his voice.

Sam had walked to the back of the store while they were discussing the watch. "Five hundred dollars for a lawn gnome? You're kidding me. Who would pay that much for a hunk of plaster?"

The pawnshop guy perked up at Sam's question.

"Well how much do you think it would be worth?"

She pursed her lips and tilted her head a little to the side. She'd gotten her hair cut that morning and it now reach just barely to her chin. "I don't think I'd pay more than two-fifty. I don't even have a lawn."

"What about in your balcony vegetable patch? One of them would look adorable."

* * *

Andrew and Sam sat at a battered table in a cramped little noodle shop on King Street, surrounded by fumes of people and curry. They'd ducked in to avoid the warm, sulfurous rain that began to pour on them halfway back to the subway station. Twenty people were crowded into the shop, which would have been hard-pressed to seat a dozen. There were no servers, just a small window in the rear wall where you could shout your order over the noise in the place, and a few minutes later the cook would pass your bowl back through.

Sam pinched a clump of noodles and jellyfish bits with her chopsticks and told Andrew, "Tricia's having a party at her place tonight. I was kinda thinking of going. The music should be okay, I think. Andrew, are you even hearing me?"

She jabbed Andrew's hand with her chopsticks. Andrew had been focused on his digital watch, frowning and pressing buttons.

"Ow, hey. I can't get it to display in twenty-four time. And I can't seem to change the time zone. It thinks it's in Estonia or something."

"Who cares? What do you need a watch to tell the time for anyway?"

Sam had a microprocessor embedded in the cuticle of her left thumb which projected the current time onto her thumbnail when she wanted it to.

"I just want to get it work right."

She took another mouthful of food and, while she chewed, her eyebrows scrunched together. "I think this might be fake jellyfish."

"Does it really make that much difference?"

"It does, to me. I don't like fake stuff. Who knows what they have to do to soy to get the consistency of jellyfish."

Andrew strapped the watch onto his wrist, lifted his hand in the air and considered how it looked.

"What do you think?"

"It looks like a hunk of plastic around your arm."

"One of the really old watches would have been cool. With a face and hands."

"I can't believe you paid that much for the thing," Sam said while chewing on another piece of the faux-jellyfish. "If you can't buy groceries at the end of the month, I'm letting you go hungry."

"My granddad gave me a watch when I little. I guess it was his watch. This one was a pocket watch. You needed to wind it everyday and you kept it attached to you belt with a chain."

"Were people stealing copper even back then?"

"Nah. I think it was just the style," he picked up his own chopsticks and started to dig into the noodles too. "Tastes like the real thing to me."

"So whatever happened to that watch?"

"I sold it. Like an idiot. I wanted to go to Europe for a summer and had no money."

Sam put down her chopsticks. "It was for a girl, wasn't it?"

"What?"

"You sold your grandfather's watch so you could go to Europe with a girl."

"Well I - well it wasn't. How do you know?"

She picked up her chopsticks and stabbed them in the air toward Andrew. "You're the cheapest person I know. You only ever spend a lot of money when a girl is involved. When we first started dating, you blew two months pay to buy us salmon steaks for dinner. Then, you like to act like a high roller."

"It was a pretty good supper, though."

"I'm surprised we didn't get mercury poisoning."

"Well anyway, now I wish I'd stayed home from Europe. I can go to Europe anytime, but I'm never going to get another watch."

"The government would have confiscated it, anyway. If you hadn't sold it."

"I could have hidden it, or something."

Sam twirled up the last of the noodles with her chopsticks and popped them into her mouth. "I gotta get to work. Think about coming to Tricia's, okay?"

She stood up, leaned over the table, and kissed Andrew on the cheek.

After she left, he went back to fiddling with the settings on his watch, but only managed to switch its location to Paris, and turn on the heart rate monitor.

* * *

Andrew walked down Spadina toward his apartment, past the vendors in stalls hawking vegetables and worms for your composting bins. He waited at the corner of Queen and Spadina for a few minutes, waiting for someone to stop and ask if he had the correct time. He'd finally got the watch to believe it was in Toronto, but he had no takers for his service.

He changed his mind about going home and caught a streetcar heading south. When he checked the time on his watch, more to look at it than to check the time, an older guy commented on it.

"Where did you dig up that old thing?"

"An antique shop in the Annex."

The old timer coughed into his sleeve and then said, "I can't believe what they sucker you kids into these days. I thought the government banned nostalgia, anyhow."

"They didn't ban it," Andrew shrugged, "They just started some social programs to discourage it. My watch is completely legal. They just can't show it on television or in streaming videos."

He looked around the streetcar defiantly.

The old timer went back to his newspaper and Andrew exited the streetcar just before the old, barricaded entrance to the Gardiner Freeway. He walked south, crossed Lakeshore, and along Lake Ontario for a while.

"It's not a nostalgia thing," he said aloud. He watched the white triangles of the sails out on the lake. Sailing had come into vogue. Anything wind powered was considered vogue. The in thing.

He undid the strap and help the plastic timepiece in both hands, looking at its display. A refurbished battery, one with enough juice to power the backlight was going to cost him nearly an entire month's pay

"It isn't a nostalgia thing," he repeated, "I just feel like an ass for pawning granddad's watch."

Andrew made a motion to throw the watch into Lake Ontario, but didn't follow through. The fine for throwing plastic into the lake was ridiculous, and street-level surveillance cameras were everywhere. People pointed their webcams out their windows, hoping to catch someone littering or polluting so they could turn them in for the reward.

He stuffed the watch into the pocket of his jeans, and started walking back home, wondering if Sam would be mad if he wore the watch to Tricia's party.

1 response to "Week #23 - Time, And the Keeping Thereof "

Erinn the Bold wrote: Tuesday, 03 Jun 2008 13:56 Dana: I like this story. Please write more stories about the future. I like where you take it. The future, that is. I like your future. Well, it interests me, at least. Good job.

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