The Clockwork Heart

Chapter Thirteen: Bread

"I hate clocks."

"Oh? Why is that, my dearest?"

"They just keep going, on and on and on. They just never stop."

***

In the past.

The next night, the Rabbit kept thinking about the girl's spell.

He had felt it--some sort of dark magic had been planted in his body, and he could feel it wrapped around his heart.

He couldn't sleep.

Large, round, unblinking eyes, staring at the roof of the shack. He remembered in the fall, when it rained, the shack would always start leaking. They put buckets under the spots, but still their mattress became damp.

The Rabbit couldn't sleep.

Sleep didn't come to him.

He was wide awake.

So that's why, in the middle of the night, he slipped out of the shack again and went to see the girl.

There she was, sleeping on the ground with the books as her pillow. She must've detected him, because she opened her eyes and looked at him. He shivered and was about to run away, but then suddenly she reached into her pocket and took out something.

A piece of bread.

'You didn't manage to get any food today, right?' her voice was inaudible because of the distance between them, yet the Rabbit could see her mouth moving.

The Rabbit stared at the bread longingly, yet at the same time, he began to back away unconsciously.

The girl frowned, her brows casting shadows over her eyes. She contemplated this for a moment, and then, lifting her hand, she threw the bread so it landed at the Rabbit's feet. Then, she turned towards the wall and seemed to fall asleep.

The Rabbit snatched up the bread from the ground and looked at it.

It wasn't just any bread--it was fine bread, the sort eaten by rich ladies. It seemed clean for the most part. The Rabbit used his sleeve to wipe off some dust and, carefully cradling it like a long-yearned-for treasure, he returned to his tent.

***

For the next two weeks, the girl continued to give him bread. Each time, he dared to go a little closer to her. Until at last, he took the bread directly from her hand.

On the fifteenth night, he asked what her name was.

"Alice Liddell," she replied. "Call me Liddell."

"Okay... miss Liddell. I am called the White Rabbit."

Her eyes were brown and bottomless, and they were filled with premature sorrow. It was almost as though she knew, simply by gut feeling, that the future would bring great sadness and was feeling sorry in advance.

Right now, those eyes stared at the Rabbit guiltily.

"I'm really sorry about using magic on you," she said quietly.

The Rabbit tensed up and instinctively reached for his chest. His heart beated under his hand, one thud after the next, rhythmic without skipping or changing a single beat. "Can you... What does that magic do?

"It can't be reversed."

"But what does it do?"

She shook her head, opened her mouth and closed it again, and then said, "I promise it won't hurt you. But it'll feel a bit strange at first."

The Rabbit didn't find that reassuring at all. He stepped back, nervously. This movement triggered something within him, a sequence of movements so well-practiced that he did it instinctively. He turned and ran away.

The alley where they lived in seemed small and suffocating all of a sudden. The stains on the wall, the bumpy dirt road, the narrowness of the space as a whole.

He remembered as a young child, he thought the alley was so big--so many people, so much space to explore. But now he had outgrown it like how he outgrew his baby clothes.

He ran away to someplace he didn't know. Then, in the morning, he returned.

***

The change came in the dark of night. As he lay on his mattress, he began to hear an unusual sound coming from his chest. It was extremely faint, so he could only hear it if the world was completely silent, and he held his breath and listened very closely.

The sound blended with the thudding of his own heart. Yet it was a distinctively different thing.

Another week passed (one month in total since the magic was casted). Now, then, the Rabbit finally realized how to describe it.

It was the sound of a clock.

Tick-tock, tick-tock.

There was a clock in his heart.

Tick-tock, tick-tock.