“If a clock could count down to the moment you meet your soul mate, would you want to know?”
One minute, 37 seconds.
My legs are shaking. Holy cow, there is no way I can do this. None.
One minute, 29 secods.
I glance around at the faces surrounding the room. Of course my Meeting would take place in the gross, overcrowded cafeteria.
One minute, six seconds.
Somewhere within these four walls, someone has the exact same countdown on their wrist. They’re going through the exact same pressure as me.
54 seconds.
Mom said I should be excited, not nervous. Yet I still find myself wiping my sweaty palms on my dress. I can’t believe she talked me into wearing a dress. I mean, shouldn’t my Soul Mate meet me as I normally am? All plain jeans, blah shirts, and wild brown curls?
30 seconds.
Something deep within me tells me to stand up. I do, drawing the attention of my tablemates. They all know too. They smile encouragingly up at me. I chew my lip nervously.
25 seconds.
That same feeling pulls me towards the center of the room. My stomach drops away from me as I take a step in that direction.
20 seconds.
I continue in that direction. With each step the tempo of my heart picks up.
19. Faster.
18. Quicker.
17. More rapid.
16. It’s racing.
Oh my god this is it. The moment my life changes forever.
My eyes search frantically around the cafeteria, searching for someone who looks as nervous as me. For someone who’s heading towards their future with no sense of direction like me.
10 seconds.
The feeling directs me slightly to the left. I turn to accomodate.
5. My heart has given up entirely.
4. I stop walking.
3. Just waiting left.
2. Everything is about to change.
1. Deep breath.0000 d 00 h 00 m 00 s
Someone bumps my shoulder. I twirl around and my gray eyes meet blue, blue ones.
“Hello there, love. It appears as though we’re Soul Mates then, eh?”
As my words fail me, the only thing I can think is “I’m so glad I shaved this morning.”I’m sitting outside a cafe when it happens, sipping some cheap drink, pretending to enjoy the sunshine. The counter runs to zero, and there is an audible click, the tab deactivates, falls off. The clink of polyurethane to cobblestone floor is echoed a few feet ahead of me. I shake a proffed hand, look up at a disdainful face.
“This is all I get?”
It’s just a couple more weeks, now. I’ve been watching closely as the numbers tick steadily down. Just a couple more weeks, I keep telling myself. Out of my group of friends, I’m on what they like to call the “fast track,” people whose numbers start much lower than others.
Two weeks, six days, fifteen hours. The clock keeps ticking. Two weeks, one day, four hours.
The days are getting so close now I’m pretty sure my uncontrollable excitement is starting to seriously annoy everyone around me. My friends tease me incessantly about who they imagine my soul mate will be. Tall, short, fat, dimples, nail biter, foot tapper.
At one week, three days, and seven hours, the clock stops.
Instead of a soul mate I get condolences, a therapist, and a broken clock.
I hurry down the clinic hallway as I slip on my button-down shirt. They just installed it- how could it have been just two minutes?
Two minutes, thirteen seconds to be exact, and I was nowhere near ready! My hair was a mess, and I felt something in my teeth. I had to look good for my soulmate. A perfectionist through and through.
A sign hanging from the ceiling pointed to a restroom to the right. I checked the time again. A minute and thirty-three seconds? Fuck! I picked up the pace and almost slipped on the time floor.
Time was almost up and my heart was racing. Finally, I dashed into the bathroom to fix myself up. The door shut, and as I looked into the mirror, I heard a click.
I checked the time. Zero.
What? This doesn’t make any…
I looked back at the mirror. Then back at the timer. Back at the mirror. Back at the timer.
“Aw, shit.”
Can this please become the new machine of death??? I want a whole book of little stories like this!!
Forgetfulness and loneliness could be such a deadly combination, especially in this case. Or perhaps it was just a lack of noticing how long I really had. The last time I looked down at my wrist was God knows when. Maybe yesterday, maybe last week. Possibly longer. And living in such a busy city should have really made me more aware of when I was going to meet my soulmate.
It was one morning when I was drinking my coffee when I realized already that it was already at 000 days.
00 hours.
00 minutes.
And 00 seconds.My heart drops. I could have passed my soulmate by in the crowd of people crossing the street. It could have been that woman who gave me directions to the bookstore or maybe the waiter who let me have a free cup of coffee. It could have even been that man who almost mugged me a few nights ago, knowing how strange fate can be.
But I never knew who that one person for me was. I’m going to have to go through my whole life without another chance to meet them again. I wonder how they feel about all this…
Not a half hour after installation, my clock went off. A doctor (very handsome, although clockless) was working on my bedside, assisting my nurse. Well then, we both must have thought, why not?
Early on, things went smoothly. But when your clock goes off, it usually does. There’s no not-knowing. You’re insured. It’s safe.
He and I were comfortable.
Very domestic.
And I was bored (to tears).
This man was not what I had envisioned. He was safe, and easy and cut and dry.
He didn’t understand, and though he was happy (content) with me, I wan’t with him. I left.
Busted clock, I thought. A scam? Maybe it’s just not for me.
But what bothers me most, is that when I think back,
my nurse was clockless too.
And I’m not sure what that means.
‘Seventeen’ my mother said, like it meant something. She squeezed my hand when the put the clock in, as if it was a guardasil shot, some sort of painful, preventative measure against something that could hurt me.
I’ve heard the way she talks to the preacher when I’m not there- in her mind, it probably is.
On the drive over to the game months later, she tries bait my enthusiasm as my clock winds down; 0d, 1h, 29m 38, 37, 36s- She says; ‘what if it’s the football captain?’
And I joke; ‘what if it’s my band teacher?’
And her face turns white and cold, mouth hard over a smile that’s clenched into a grimace.
I take my place in the stands with the rest of the marching band, fellow flutists looking at my clock with varied expressions. Envy, hope, congratulations, curiosity. A few rows behind me, the percussionists start taking bets.
I play through almost mechanically, stomach churning with nerves as the game winds on and the clock counts down. Down on the field, the home team is crushing the visitors, which is bad news, since it means that for the next few weeks things will be tense back home as the team tries to recapture their honor after having lost so badly.
The game comes to halftime eventually, and the players file off as the home cheerleaders take the field once more, center stage while the boys regroup.
One girl with hair bright enough to see from the stands is lifted into the air by her teammates until she’s level-eyed with me, and my heart stops when the clock on my wrist does.
The beeping is all the way down in my lap but I can hear inside my skull. From the look my mother sends me from a few rows over, I can tell she either heard it too, or she’s been counting along as well. She follows the tracks of my eyes, and her face goes just as white as mine does when she catches sight of the cheerleader staring almost blankly at me.
I’m frozen. My mother stands.
I bolt.
Down, down to the field, leaving the flute behind, leaping the fence. I have to see her, get to her- Or at least, the was the plan.
My mother’s hand catches me sharply on the shoulder, pointed nails digging deep into my skin through my uniform before I’m even halfway out of my seat. Down on the field, the cheerleader is crying.
‘No daughter of mine’- she hisses and the next thing I know I’m in the car, crying quiet as she drives me to the camp from the brochure the preacher gave her two months ago.
‘There are people who can help’ my mother says through a clenched jaw, the muscles in her face twitching with rage and effort as her knuckles turn white around the steering wheel. They’re specialists in this sort of repair. Your clock is just broken, that’s all. You’ll be spending some time with them so they can fix this-
‘You mean fix me’ I say, and my mother nods shortly.
‘Yes. Fix you.’
She stands nervously in the street, looking blankly at her clock. A few seconds to go. There are people all around. How is she ever supposed to find her soul mate here?
The clock counts down.
10
She starts walking to the bus stop. She doesn’t want her soul mate to be one of those people who are always downtown.
9
She gets pushed into the road by some hooligan in a rebel coat, obviously running from the police a block away.
8
She stands up, cursing her bad luck and a starts wiping down her pants, conveniently forgetting that she’s in the middle of the street.
7
She hears honking and turns to see the car rushing towards her.
6
There’s no time to get out of the road. She braces for impact.
5
She hears a yell, just as the car is about to reach her. She begins to turn.
4
There’s a flash of colour and she’s knocked to the ground. Her head hits the cement, and blood starts to pour.
3
She dazedly looks at the sky for a moment before her eyes start drifting.
2
There’s a faint voice asking if she’s alright. She tries to shake her head.
1
She sees blue eyes peering into her dark green ones, and another woman is holding her face.
0
She hears two clocks beeping at her in synchronization, and raises her hand to touch the girls face, those deep blue eyes showing concern and also possibly love? But that lasts for only a second before her vision goes dark and blood loss catches up to her.
The next time she wakes up, it’s in a white room, with beeping in her ears once again, and a tube attached to her face. She cringes and struggles to sit up, pulling the oxygen tube away. She looks at the door.
The doctor comes in and smiles at her asking her questions she easily has the answers too.
“What’s your name?”
“Hallie. It’s short for Halimeda. Last name, Katsaros.”
Then he asks her one she doesn’t.
“What’s the name of your soul mate?”
“My… Soul mate?”
The doctor nods and points to the woman asleep on the other side of the room, curled in the visitors chair with a bandage around her arm. He explains that she came in with Hallie and said that she was Hallie’s soul mate.
There’s an expression of confusion on her face and the doctor says a soft ‘oh’ and then excuses himself.
Hallie turns to the other woman, mind flickering to the moment when she saw those deep blue eyes. Her green ones immediately search out anything else she can recognize, but she realizes she didn’t see anything else. She slowly stands up, wobbling and quickly realizing she’s not wearing proper clothes.
Hallie taps the shoulder of the other girl, whose eyes open revealing deep blue eyes, which make Hallie’s own eyes water. She immediately clings to the other girl and apologizes over and over again.
It takes some time until finally the other girl pushes her slightly away, and then smiles softly.
“My name is Nicole Daniels. I’ll be your soul mate for the rest of your life.”
Hallie kisses Nicole.
Nicole isn’t just one of those people who are always downtown. She’s a rebel though.
Hallie is just what Nicole imagined too.
They go on for years, first dating, and then on the anniversary of their meeting, they get married.
And Nicole kisses Hallie.
((Oops I fic’d. Here have four.))
Soul Mates Drabbles
One
I’m six years old when Carlos moves in across the street. He has a dog named Muffin that falls in love with my dog, Spinner, and we spend every waking minute together for the next six years. As we grow older, we hear our Moms talking about the timers they used to wear, and the two men who became their soul mates. Carlos and I joke about being soul mates, saying we don’t need girls or timers to have happy lives.
Our mothers disagree. When we are twelve years old Carlos and I are taken to get our timers. We’re young, but older than when they wanted to get them, and my Mom is much more excited than I am. My timer is installed without a hitch, but as the numbers appear on the watch, they stay at zero. Mom panics and yells at the doctor. He explains that if I’ve already met my soul mate the timer won’t turn on. Mom goes very quiet. In the waiting room, Carlos is sitting in a chair, his own timer attached to his wrist. His mother looks upset and they whisper together. I show my timer to Carlos, and his eyes get very wide.
“James,” he says, holding out his own timer. The numbers on our timers match. All zeroes. The two of us grin at each other. We were right all along. We didn’t need the timers to find our soul mates, because, at six years old, we’d found each other all by ourselves.
Two
I look out to the street, away from my class as they set up for filming. On my wrist, the timer counts down. One minute, fifteen seconds to go. My eyes go back to the class and I bite my lip. We’d compared timers before, none of them matched. Close my eyes and take a deep breath. Whoever my soul mate is, I’m going to be ready for them.
“Alana!” calls a friend, but another shushes him. They know that I’m preparing. That I need to prepare. I look out to the street again, squinting. The timer reads thirty seconds. I step toward the street, drawn, and search the busy sidewalks for a pair of eyes willing to meet mine. None do. The timer reads ten seconds. I turn back toward the class, ready to leave, and a limo window rolls down. A man with hair grey at the roots stares at me, sunglasses around his neck. My timer goes off. So does his. He smiles and I run.
“No,” I say, running away from the limo. He is old, far older than me. This wasn’t supposed to happen. My soul mate was supposed to be young, gorgeous, and have a nice smile. Not a man old enough to be my father. I rip off the timer and run home, tears streaming down my face. There goes my only chance at a fairy tale.
Three
I scurry through the library, book open in front of me. I’m late, but I cannot stop reading. I round one stack of books, then another. Then I strike something hard. In an instant I’m on the ground, books scattered around me. There’s a man standing over me, chest as hard as a brick wall. I look up and meet his curious grey eyes. Our timers go off. He looks to his, then to me, and then offers his hand to pull me up. I take it.
“Moose?” I say, biting my lip. “I haven’t seen you since high school.”
“Yeah,” he says. “Good to see you, Roy.” We grin at each other, each a little sheepish. I wonder why my timer never went off around him before, and it occurs to me we’ve never spoken.
“You’re in Literature, right?” asks Moose. I nod. He holds up his books. “Can you, uh, tutor me?” I smile pushing up my glasses.
“Of course.” He places a hand on the small of my back and guides me to a table. I’m going to miss tutoring my roommate, but somehow, I think, watching Moose frown over Shakespeare, I think he’ll understand.
Four
I laugh to myself as I walk down the field, preparing for the latest in my mini-attacks. They are harmless, and have only ever given me a bloody nose from banging my head off a truck, but I still enjoy them. My sister says I’m still a little boy on the inside. I don’t disagree. I take a break and prepare, rubbing at the area under my timer. Then, stopping abruptly, I go ramrod straight and fall backwards.
“Trust fall!” I call as I fall. Warm, rough hands wrap around my biceps and I’m stopped. A man slightly larger than myself grins down at me.
“I got you,” he says. Our timers go off as he speaks. His eyes widen, his expression going from playful to soft. “I got you,” he repeats, voice soft.
“Yeah,” I whisper. “You do.”
((For those of you who know of the Trust Fall Prank you’ll know who the last two are. Because Tumblr creates OTPs.))
I never cared much for the watches, even though I’d gotten one like everyone else. It just seemed like a bad idea Jumping into a relationship with someone they knew nothing about simply because a piece of plastic and circuits told them to? Yeah, not really my thing. So when I met Joseph in an online chatroom, I didn’t even think about the watch.
We became fast friends, and found it easy to be open with each other. Soon enough there was this dumb joke among the group that the two of us were totally gay for each other, and even though we were both completely straight, we embraced it.
After about three months of calling each other names like ‘sweetie’ and ‘honey’ and signing off with <3s, even when it was just the two of us, I asked him if we were actually serious about it all. He said he didn’t know, but he supposed he didn’t mind it. That night was the first time in weeks that I even looked at my watch for more than a passing glance in weeks.
It wasn’t that I actually believed in it. I guess maybe a part of me did, locked away in the back of my mind? Or, at least I was curious.
Just over a year.
I shrugged it off and went to bed. About a week later, Joseph and I decided that we wanted to meet in person before we really came to any decisions. Since he had money and I didn’t, it was decided that he would drive up from Indiana to Ontario that summer - it was March when we made the decision, but I was still in school that year - to stay at my house for a week. I cleared it with my parents and everything.
And then his grandparents got very sick. His parents went on a trip to visit them, and of course he had to go with them. It took all summer, taking care of them and apparently repairing his house from some kind of drainage damage that happened while they were gone. So we missed that chance.
We rescheduled. My birthday was in November, so we waited and planned for him to come up then instead. It was all going smoothly.
Two days before he was set to arrive, he realized he needed to renew his passport. He didn’t have time to do it and still come up to Ontario, so we lost that chance too.
He finally got his passport, but in the intervening time my grandfather died and mom had to leave town to take care of grandma Dad said he couldn’t manage a houseguest on his own, even though I swore again and again that I would take care of everything! So Joseph and I waited. And waited.
A little part of me was growing anxious. I checked my watch more and more frequently. It was getting pretty close, only a couple of weeks. What if it was real, and I met whoever it was that was actually my soul mate, and had to break the news to Joseph? I did my best not to show how nervous I was, and told myself it was just an idiot fad.
Finally, all the strings were cleared up and Joseph was able to drive up to Ontario. He started at 6:00 AM and said it would take him twelve hours. My watch read 42.
I could barely think, barely function at all that day. I told myself I shouldn’t believe it, but I couldn’t escape the enormous dread that Joseph and I would be out, showing him my hometown, and I would bump into someone and they would be my soulmate. There are no words to describe the terror I felt as I sat on the stairs behind my front door and waited.
And there are even fewer words for the terror I felt when hour 24 hit and I had heard no word from him.
I didn’t get any sleep that night, I just lay in bed asking myself what had happened? Horror grasped my heart and made the whole world turn even darker when a terrible thought occurred to me. I’d never even mentioned the watches to him. What if, on the drive up, he stopped at a restaurant, or a gas station or something, and ran into his soul mate? And left me without even a one-sentence explanation? No, he couldn’t possibly have.
I didn’t get out of bed that morning. My parents came and tried to talk to me, but I didn’t hear them. A few minutes before noon, I finally got up and sulked over to the kitchen, to get some lunch. If I was going to meet my soul mate, they were going to have to literally march into my house and present themself to my pyjamas, bed-hair, B.O. and filthy dental hygiene.
And then the doorbell rang.
I looked at my watch. Ten seconds.
I dropped my bowl, spilling milk all over the floor. I didn’t care, I would pick it up later.
I opened the door, and…there he was. Joseph, just as he looked in the picture’s he’d send me. But there, in the flesh. Both our watches started beeping.
“Hey,” he said, looking sheepish. ”I uh…I got caught in a snowstorm on my way here. Sorry about that.”
It seemed those days that everyone had a watch. Men, women, children- nobody was ashamed of wanting to know when they would meet the person they loved. At first, of course, the men weren’t so into it, too masculine for it or something, but over time people stopped carrying. It wasn’t immasculine to want to fall in love.
It was human.
It seemed everybody had a watch. That could be because the governments had started funding them, and anyone could walk up to the nearest Clinic and get one installed for free. Nobody knew how they worked, not even the people who made them. They only knew that they did, and that everybody had a soulmate.
Everybody, that is, but Genevieve Pierce.
Genevieve was nineteen years old and did not believe in soulmates. She did not have a watch. It’s not that she didn’t trust them, or that she was a rebel, it’s just that she didn’t want a soulmate. She was perfectly happy being alone, for she had always been alone. She had never been comfortable with another person touching her or holding her, if only because she had never been touched or held. She wasn’t used to it, and she didn’t want it.
And she was happy.
It wasn’t until age twenty-two that she got a watch installed in her wrist, and it was only because it had become mandated by the law for every person above the age of five to have a watch installed. Nobody thought that was too young, of course, for the sooner one found their soulmate, the better. And everybody had a soulmate.
Everybody, that is, but Genevieve Pierce.
Because when Genevieve had her watch installed, it was blank. No numbers. No zero’s. No days or months or years. It was simply blank. The doctors were concerned and quickly installed another, yet it too was blank. The nurses offered condolences, and therepy was advised. But Genevieve didn’t mind. Genevieve Pierce didn’t want a soulmate. The doctors offered to remove the watch from her wrist, but Genevieve refused. She wanted to keep that reminder of how lucky she was. So she waved goodbye, the light flashing off the white bar on her wrist, and went on her merry way. Because everybody had a soumate.
Everybody, that is, but Genevieve pierce.
And she was happy.
Ella had not married her soul mate. These days it seemed like everybody did, and some thought her strange for marrying a man while they both still had their watches, but—well. She’d seen how her parents turned out, and she knew you needed more than love for a relationship. What she and Alex had was even better. They loved each other, yes, but they also had trust and respect.
So while people may have warned her that everything would change when one of them met their soul mate, Ella paid them no attention. She knew that she could trust Alex to be open with her about his soul mate when he found them. She would do the same for him when her clock ran out in a year. In the meantime, they meant to start a family.
There were a few false starts at the beginning, but eventually the test showed up positive. Alex started working on furnishing the spare room in the house for the baby to come, Ella made sure she would have time off work later in her pregnancy, and together they went to pre-natal tests and parenting classes.
When the baby (a girl!) started to kick, Ella would whisper how strong a little girl the baby was. She felt a bit silly at first, talking to a baby that was still in her belly, but the pride in Alex’s eyes the first time he caught her at it made her grin. After that, on nights she had trouble sleeping from the cramps and aches, he would kiss her swollen belly and start murmuring sweetly to both her and the child. They talked baby names and settled on Rose, bought clothes and books to read to her, called their relatives about the good news.
Labor for Ella seemed surreal. She knew she was giving birth; she could see it happening, and there was some sort of weird not-sensation, but she couldn’t feel anything below her waist. After what seemed liked forever, the doctor held up the baby, squalling and pink as her name. They cleaned her and placed her on Ella’s chest as they showed Alex where to cut the umbilical cord. Ella was weak, so it was up to the baby to struggle its way around to look at its mother, still screaming as it moved until—there. Their eyes met, huge blue and sleepy green, and Rose abruptly stopped her noise as a louder one filled the room, a consistent beeping that drove the nurses into a frenzy checking the equipment. It wasn’t until Rose started mouthing at her mother’s wrist supporting the little girl’s head that Ella saw it. 0000d, 00h, 00m, 00s, blinking in and out.
A dopey grin spread across her face as she looked up at her husband, only widening at the stunned look on his face.
“Honey, I think I found my soul mate. She’s gonna be staying with us a while, hope you don’t mind.”
He positively beamed at her.
(Source: illness-and-instruments)
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