Chapter One

Charlotte lay awake all night listening to the clock in the downstairs hallway. Every quarter hour it squeezed out a chime within a long and predictable sequence of sounds that became more distinct as the night wore on: a wheeze, a cough, a running start, and finally, a pause and a failure of nerve, and then a little song-another quarter hour is coming, another is gone, another is coming, another is gone. She pictured the old, dead quarter hours piling up, then sliding off the pile and disappearing into endless Time where quarter hours didn't count. Quarter hours were mere human constructions, temporary units fabricated by mankind for convenience in daily life, like minutes, though more important than minutes, since clocks didn't chime every minute-and for that she was very grateful. There was an infinite number of units of time, as many as you could think of names for, each one folded inside the other, their inward progression stretching beyond the mind's eye, to the outer edge of knowing, all of them ticking, relentlessly beating, like her own heart.

She decided to drown them. She gathered them into Melvin's fishing net and lowered them into a dark pool, watching as the flimsy little units cascaded gently toward the muck at the bottom. Just before they landed, she reversed the net and whipped it out of the water. Success! None had stuck! They were all gone, or nearly all. Just one was left; it clung to the net, its delicate green wings twitching, ticking, relentlessly beating. . . . She was doomed; she would never sleep. Her skin prickled; her long, heavy braid pulled at her scalp. She listened to Melvin breathing peacefully beside her, to the quiet little snort at the bottom