Three Minutes to Midnight
A decision in waiting
There were three minutes left of Christmas Day, and he hadn’t achieved what he had set out to do. It was impossible now, but those three minutes were still there. A lot could happen in that period of time. A pop song. A poem. A bowl of soup in the microwave.
What could he do though? His own parents were in bed, presumably asleep. Janice would be asleep too, or at least lying in bed listening to some depressing music. His clock didn’t go so far as to count down the seconds, so he glanced at the time on his locked phone screen. 11:57:32.
What would happen, really, once the scales on his old-fashioned ticker board clock had flicked over, with a slightly louder clunk than at any other time of the day, to show am12:00? Nothing. Another day. The clock didn’t care that this day was any more significant to millions of humans around the world. Time just ticked on, past Christmases, past birthdays, past anniversaries—happy and sad—into new years, into new decades, new centuries and millennia, relentless.
Time doesn’t care, he realised. Time can’t care. Time has no emotions. It doesn’t matter if, after three minutes, a human being will experience absolute pleasure, or be subjected to mind-bending pain. Time will arrive at the end of those three minutes unbendingly, remorselessly, unthinkingly. Oh, to be like time. Two minutes and ten seconds remained, the first ten seconds of which he could have sworn moved faster than any ten seconds ever had. Twitch. pm11:58.
So time couldn’t care less about his resolution, his need to have done that one thing on Christmas Day. It didn’t matter that anyone he could have told was now several miles away, or tucked safely in bed, and wouldn’t at all appreciate being woken at this time of the night. It was hopeless; the moment had long since passed. And yet, with those last two minutes on the clock, everything still felt possible.
He hopped down from the bed, and heaved open his window. A blast of cool air whipped around and past him, gleefully filling the small bedroom. The curtains wafted, and curls of wrapping paper rustled across the floor. He leaned on the windowsill, until the top half of his body had emerged from the window. There were lights still on down the street, in windows, flickering from TV screens, wrapped around trees. Beyond their little village, up and over that mountain, the city would still be ablaze with electricity. People still awake, still alive. They would hear what he was about to announce.
He'd say what he should have said around the table, nonchalantly, between his dad asking for the gravy and his mother asking if the turkey was too dry. But what would be the point in yelling it out at the night sky? Where, if he was lucky, a grand total of two people might hear it, and wonder for a second what was going on, before shrugging and reaching for a box of chocolates. That is, if his voice wasn’t simply whisked away by the breeze. He was always being told to speak up.
He stepped back inside, and let the window drop with a thud. The curtains fell limp, the house’s warmth began asserting itself again. The room fell silent, save for a steadfast tick from his bedside clock. pm11:59.
One minute left. Less now. Fifty-five seconds at most. He could text them, he thought. A group message that said what he couldn’t quite manage to say earlier that day, at the table, in one of the lulls in conversation that had grown more frequent as the meal dragged on past the turkey and towards the pudding. They wouldn’t see the message until tomorrow morning though, and he hadn’t set himself the challenge of a Boxing Day announcement. It wouldn’t count.
Thirty seconds to go. Finally the time remaining seemed tiny, miniscule, too short for a pop song or a poem, except maybe a haiku. Or a limerick. There was a young man in his bedroom…. Soup would barely be lukewarm after that short a time in the microwave. Finally, he felt something inside him sink, the same feeling he had felt nine hours before, as his family, one by one, dragged their food-heavy bodies up and away from the table, until it was just him left sitting there, in a yellow paper hat. Fat, lazy, useless. He sat back on his bed, then curled up into a foetal ball.
He reached for his phone, and propped it up against a pillow. 11:59:50. He couldn’t help but watch. Fifty-one. Fifty-two. He heard his door click open, and he craned his neck to see. It was his sister, a pair of headphones hanging around her neck.
‘Hey,’ Janice said. ‘You sleeping?’
‘No.’
‘You okay? You seemed a bit weird at dinner and I meant to, like, ask.’ She then rolled her eyes, acknowledging how lame she sounded.
‘Ummm…’
Above his head he heard the thunk, louder than all the others, which meant that all four tickers had switched at once, revealing a new day. am12:00 on Boxing Day. St. Stephen’s Day. The 26th of December. A day of many names. A day of twenty-four hours, of one thousand four hundred and forty minutes, of eighty six thousand four hundred seconds, stretching out before him. He felt a weight lifting.
Stewart McKay has lived in Hong Kong for twelve years. He has been a member of the Writers Circle for ten of these, and has contributed to numerous HKWC anthologies. He is the lead editor of the Circle's upcoming anthology, 'Lost in Transition', and also edited ‘HK24’ in 2017. His fiction has appeared in Grindstone and Raconteur magazines, and he is currently a semi-finalist in the 2023 Proverse Prize.
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