A LEAP SECOND
He opened the box of extra seconds, letting them warm to room temperature. The seconds, packed in like eggs, hummed in the carton. He turned to the window to pass the time. Later, he would select one second and add it to the official time, but for now he thought about what had happened. Outside, it was snowing. It seemed to always snow at this time, at times like this. The snow was a kind of static in the window. Not long ago, she had said it was over. This this was over. A moment before they had been a they and then, then. One day, way before that moment they would no longer be a they, there had been that other moment, a moment when they had become a they. Time passed as he thought of these two distinct points in time. Outside, it snowed regularly. The earth was slowing down. One day it would stop all together. But that wouldn't be for a very long time. Meanwhile, time needed to be corrected. Brought up to date. Another extra second needed to be added in order for time to synchronize with the decaying speed of the world, the planet stalling. He will spend the rest of his life doing this, what he is doing now, turning to the box, his hand hovering over the thrumming seconds as if to select a chocolate from a sampler. The rest of his life will be an accumulation of these second seconds. Suddenly, he thinks.
DAYLIGHT SAVING
Fall.
Fall, in the middle of the night, she was riding the Century Limited west from New York to Chicago when, suddenly, the train came to a creaking halt in the middle of an Ohio cornfield.
Such delays are not all that unusual for a passenger train that runs its routes over private, freight company rails.
Passenger trains are often shunted off onto a siding, letting the proprietor freight have the right-of-way.
But this pause was different.
Time was falling back.
Time zone after time zone, time was turning back time.
This wrecked the train's schedule.
If the train didn't stop, it would actually arrive early at the next station.
The train's schedule had to catch up to the train.
Pass it.
She stood looking out the open top of the Dutch door in the vestibule between cars.
No lights, but cornfields everywhere, she knew, or bean fields that next year would be cornfields and bean fields that next year would be corn again in the rotation.
All over the country, trains, passenger and freight, were slowing down, coming to a halt where they were.
Trains waited, panting, stopped in their tracks.
Out of time, she waited for the time to overtake her, time to catch up everywhere.
Time would, she thought, slam by shaking the whole car like when another train on the paralleling track slammed by this train, rattling the windows, drawing the air out of the coaches.
Time expedited, a true “Limited.“
Tracks cleared, the light green, time highballing west.
Then, the brakes would sneeze, and the travel in the coupling would groan and take hold and the tug would stutter through the cars, one after the other, and she would be moving again.
Trying to catch up now.
He would know to wait.
He would have remembered to turn back all the clocks, say to her, when they met again at the station, that they had lost the hour.
Stalled, she watched the moon move west over the cornfields, the bean fields, out ahead of the train, extending its lead.
He watched the moon rise over the lake, bearing down, gaining on the train somewhere out there behind it. The moon's a clock face, handless, or its hands a blur, a faceless clock, unstoppable.
It seemed he had now this extra hour to live through again, this time to kill, but it didn't really count.
She would arrive an hour late.
They all lied when they said they hadn't really lost the hour, that they weren't really late.
Everyone was instructed to set their clocks back before they went to sleep.
He stayed up and waited for the time, for the time that time officially drifted.
Looking up at the stars, he remembered he was looking back into time.
The light landing on earth this second was ancient.
And in the spring, when they might see each other again, he flying there or taking a train or driving, he would have to give the hour back again in any case.
Time was distance, distance time.
He was here and she was there.
Seconds opened and, then, closed.
LEAP DAY
They broke up then on leap day over e-mail, sending ever-shorter messages back and forth by hitting the reply button until the final word stop was the final word.
They left the subject field blank except for the abbreviation for regarding, re:, which multiplied with each reply to one another so, at last, the space read: re: re:re: re: etc.
Each of them, miles apart, paused a moment to read again what each had written on the screen, the fingers poised about to send the other this next leap.
Four years later, all the reasons for doing what they did are lost to them, the e-mail program purged, but this extra day returns to both a surplus sadness.
Four Alabama Seasons
WINTER
Even when the fans are not running under power, they feather in the breeze. Turning over, the blades mill wind. Flatbeds stacked with chicken cages piled two stories high pull in behind the wall of fans, parked for their turn unloading at the loading dock. White chickens stuff the black wire cages. The fans start up, turn, blur. The air pushes through the cages, and feathers spit out the other side. Everywhere on the ground are loose white feathers. The feathers blow across the street, cars stirring up the feathers, catch in the breeze that has not been manufactured. Breeze that is breeze. The feathers form a drift of down next to the red cedar slat fence of the city's junkyard. Balls of feathers, hefty as chickens and as plump, tumble into the ditch. Up north, a fence like that would be strung along a highway to knock the snow out of a blizzard. Loose feathers swirl around wrecked police black-and-whites in the lot, begin to tar the cars, coat the surface of muddy puddles left by the rain.
SPRING
Spring and all is new green grass drowned by new white, white sand of the golf course groundskeeping. The rain puts a crust on the traps that must be raked until they shimmer, a sawing corduroy seen from a distance, a breeze chopping up the surface of a scummy pond. Pollen, the gist of the season, tarnishes every surface, takes away its shine, a mat of grainy finish. But today, see? Spilled sparkle of sand curved through the blacktopped intersection out front, traced a dump truck's too-tight turn. Already, house sparrows bathe in the fresh dune, intermittent puffs of dust along the drift, a moon's crescent in shadow. There, the white sand turns black. A mockingbird on the strung cable mimics the neighborhood's air conditioners. All emit this compressed chatter as the sun clears the stand of oak soaked with wisteria. It will rain later and the sand will melt, forget itself. That dawn's gesture's just grist.
SUMMER