The river had hardened. The 12 o clock sun had sent across a heat wave swallowing the whole expanse of the road, and what was left of it but the white dashes of stitching clothing the earth. I had laid out on my backseat of the car, it didn't matter what hour it was, what mattered was how this was born. I was a giant whale, on the entire row of the back seat of the car, the whole of my back pressed on the seat, feet crossed at the sill of the side windows. Every time the vehicle would come to a slow stop my legs would split my knees come apart. We pass by a hotel, the lights dancing in a net across the whole checker board of rooms through the light in their windows. It'd be me looking out; me looking in. It was about a month ago, that I realized time was irrelevant. This was how it was born:

I could hear a watch ticking, I didn't know where it was coming from. A clock going back was the same as I clock moving forward, either way, we were all ants moving in a colony.

‘The unlikely hero is the sound of a chirping bird that comes every hour.' The phrase bounced around his head and circled enough to times to be said out loud. So he did:

"The unlikely hero is the sound of a chirping bird that comes every hour."

No heads turned the clicking and clacking of fingers and nails, of uneven beats continued against the keyboard. He paused for a while, and tried to recall where he had first heard or read this.

The room wasn't very large, white washed walls, carpeted floors, blue, corked ceiling and vertical blinds, your typical office. At times he wondered what sound the room was trying to absorb. There were ten people in the room, similarly dressed as he was. White polo, two buttons open from the throat, collar down, no neck tie and grey slacks. He tilted his head to the left then to the right, all the while the computer screen emanating an artificial glow. He couldn't remember.

There was some truth to this, he thought as he starred at the clock counting down to the end of his office hours. Still, when he faced the computer screen and resumed work, the peripheral view of his right eye told him the second hand was moving back; and kept ticking back, an irksome moving hand, the sound of a flicking finger playing against his ear. His fingers once again resumed what the others were doing, a collection of clicking a clacking, drowning out the ticking to be replaced by something just as bad.

The long hour stretched out before him, the coffee and crackers fanned out like a discarded deck of cards. The steam rising from the mug had long since turned stale, stained ¼th deep inside, a ring of brown left like a kiss mark at the rim. He edged forward on his swivel chair, his back rounding, shoulders lowered to a sleeping state.