Rinse Repeat
by Thomas Kleaton
Williford awoke before Alice, rocking in his chair to the ticking of the grandfather clock in the hallway.
He had no recollection of the night its chimes prompted him to run screaming into his mother’s room. He’d seen only the terrible grasping hands of the clock as she reached for him.
He eyed Alice’s sewing scissors when he bent to kiss her awake, shears matching ones that made twenty stab wounds in his mother’s back some five decades before. Her clock squatted next to them, a wind-up model with twin bells on top.
It went off then, arousing old terrors.
