Image: Geralt@pixabay.com.

Muriel had a thing about time. She was obsessed by it.

Her attraction was best described as a desire to purchase as many time pieces as she could in the mistaken belief that owning so much time might allow her to control the passing of it.

Her house was a virtual monument to time, clocks of all sorts of shapes and sizes littered every room.

In one room, she had a cabinet, securely locked in which she had the most magnificent collection of wrist watches, all in working order and ticking away the minutes as she watched.

Muriel was bothered that time was robbing her of life. From childhood, she worried that time was passing and she was showing the effects of that passing.

Now in middle age, she had long given up the pursuit of denying birthdays, her family arrived each June 23^rd, a cake and candles in hand, a casserole dinner and a few bottles of red to wash it down and make her forget she was a year older.

It was a matter of watching the wrinkles and creases around her eyes spreading as the years went by, and such was her concern she removed the mirrors from every room in her house.

On Wednesdays, she went around and stopped every time piece in the hope time could be stalled if only for a day.

Thursday was her day of hope, a day where she had denied time it’s inexorable ravaging of her good self.

She wondered if it worked so well for one day would it produce the same but greater benefit over two days?

She tried it the following Wednesday only to suffer the strange fate as a chair in her street* had when she wasn’t watching the Number 47 bus coming her way.

* https://summerstommy.com/2019/07/03/sunday-photo-fiction-june-30-2019-great-aunt-alices-chair/

Written for: https://fivedotoh.com/2019/07/01/fandangos-flash-fiction-challenge-20/