some_small_joke raze before all the ugly words and the end of everything, there was the clock that wouldn't shut up. because he didn't wear a watch and she had nothing in her room to tell time, the first night he slept in her bed he brought with him a black portable digital device the size a flip phone would have been before cell phones were made small enough to fit inside a front shirt pocket without showing, having bought it earlier that day. it carried all of his last name in the first half of its mononym, a detail he wouldn't notice until years later, having kept it as a sort of powerless totem to conjure grainy pictures of her when he was in the conjuring mood. that first night he set the alarm for the next morning, and while his fingers explored parts of her that were wet and warm and soft and new to him and her mouth made soft music, the wake_up call sounded nine hours early, making a distracting agent of its high-pitched metronomic bleating. he pressed a button to silence it. it started up a second time before enough seconds had passed to fill a minute, and would not be silenced again. he took the clock that wasn't a phone into her bathroom, swore at it, and, unable to remove the lithium battery, that stupid flattened inedible silver pea, twisted the black plastic body in his hands like he was strangling a washcloth hardened near to stone, until something inside it broke and the screen went blank and all distracting bleating ceased forever. and he walked back to the bed where she was waiting with her curious smile and all her perfect pale curves revealed, and finished what the dead plastic comedian had interrupted, not knowing or caring what the time was. 131112 what's it to you? who go blather from