That little old bomb just went on ticking....

[Peter McNiff]

Tick-tock-tick-tock is the sound of the twenty-five year old clock on this bomb, not an actual bomb understand, just the sound of one in the mind ticking away under the family table ready to blow the day after daddy starts messing around with his office assistant, Myra, who tells him to dump his wife and two kids and move in with her which, after several riotous months he does, when she heralds the news of a birth in the offing, thanks to him.

The clock came the day he pledged to marry his wife and live with her for the rest of his life and it ticked merrily on for nine not unhappy years, tick-tock, tick-tock, until the affair with Myra began and a change in its ticking could be heard clearly from under the family table, but now it sounded ever so slightly deranged: tick-tock, tickety-tock, that even Julia, his wife, noticed one morning and raising her head from her cornflakes said: “Harry do you hear that sound, tick-tock tickety-tock?”

Harry heard it all right but he lied, well aware that the sound of the old fashioned clock attached to the bomb ticking away under the kitchen table had changed, to tickety-tock, knowing that one day it could blow in his face, tick-tock tickety-tock, he raced into his office assistant and told her straight out, “My wife thinks there’s a bomb ticking away under the table back at the house—what shall I do?”

“Kill her,” said Myra—before you could say as much as tick or a tock—but the clock whirred in his mind and a lever missed a click, changing its tune to tickety-tock tickety-tick, not the steady old sound it used to be, making Harry feel truly nervous, not for a moment knowing how he could possibly butcher his wife, the one true-love of his life, who had raised his kids while he played around on the stock exchange, as well as with Myra, who now he began to look upon as just a tad too self-centred, so he killed her off instead, and the clock returned to an almost normal, tick-tock tickety tock, after he got rid of the body in a sack filled with rocks that sank to the bottom of a lake, splash, tick-tock tickety-tock.

He returned to his wife which, so it is said, sixty-two per cent of all males do, tick-tock tickety-tock, after extra-marital affairs though not all of them kill off the one they had fun with, tick-tock, and time being time it went by for another ten years and despite alarms and enquiries, nobody ever knew what happened to Myra, tickety-tock tickety tock, until the day the dam ran out of water and a boy with a dog in a punt discovered her bones in the pond that was left, as well as her clothes and a watch on her fleshless wrist, that Harry had given her, tick tick, tick tick.

So the clock on the bomb was carefully dismantled and Harry is inside doing tick-tock, tick-tock; while for Julia, his wife of 25 years and their two kids, the clock under the family table no longer ticks.

[Joe Gensle]

Found myself inside Harry's mind even though not told from Harry's 1st-person perspective. I'm wowed--most impressive, Peter

[shauna mcclure]

very poe...in a good way. i should like to hear what julia has to say about harry.

[Sandra Davies]

Oh brilliant - love the way this just ...ticks along keeps going so merrily and inevitable, and that Harry finished doing time. by getting his comeuppance.