The Hourglass
an excerpt

CHAPTER I - GRAINS

The houses on Lysol Street were clean, white, and neatly framed by the “American Dream”-styled picket fences. The neighbourhood itself resembled the famous toilet cleaner with its pristine whiteness, and the young, fashionable couples out walking with their thousand-dollar specially bred dogs seemed as though they were about to be flushed out by the hot-white sun blasting down on them. It made Elysses sweat in her helmet, seated atop her 20-year old Vespa with big black poufs coming out the other end. No doubt she attracted a lot of attention, but at the very least no crazy environmentalists had jumped her yet for killing the atmosphere.

Number Eleven was not hard to find, not because it stood out amidst the white houses with its greyish tint, but because it was so small Elysses took it at first to be the garden shed of the handsome house next door. Seeing as she was already late, she threw her scooter down on the front lawn and grabbed the box she had been tasked with delivering. A note on the door signalled that deliveries were to be made at the back door, so Elysses pushed open the gate leading to the backyard, and traipsed carefully across the stone trail, long overgrown with daisies.

Compared to the military buzz cut front lawn, the backyard was an abysmal place. Bits of broken glass and large coils of metal wires were strewn about everywhere. There were several curiously long, though rusted, knives leaning against one wall, which was completely covered with ivy that snaked itself all the way up to the gutters above the third floor windows. Cautiously picking her way across the junkyard, and slightly frightened by the minimal possibility of there being a land mine buried somewhere under all that overgrown weed, she managed to leap on to the crumbling yellowed cement landing that housed the back door.

There was no doorbell to ring, and the flimsy wired netting on the screen door had a great big hole in it, so Elysses decided to reach right through the hole and give the wooden door behind it a hearty tap.

To her surprise, the door opened almost immediately. Even in the blinding afternoon sun; however, the hallway (or at least she thought it was a hallway) was only dimly lit, and her fear of dark places came back to haunt her.

Somewhere inside the house, a young woman beckoned to her impatiently, “You’re late! I need my sulphur and my red candle wax and my parchment paper and now you’ve made me late for all my appointments, and those darn ants are eating up the place without my special formula! I swear to Muse if I catch them shredding up my curtains I’ll have them beheaded!”