Leaving the Almost Palindrome City
"The crooked clockmaker lured the buxom blonde with the wandering eye to his tower with golden-gadgeted promises… little did she know that his so-called mechanical marvels were modeled upon false geometric principles. Fortunately for her, a handsome hero hovered on the horizon."
The writer Buckminster F. doesn't bother to give me a name. He also doesn't bother to mention how she sits on the bench for almost another hour as I steal glances at her from behind the clock's primary pendulum. No details whatsoever about how my love scribbles ever so frantically in her sketchbook, or how she folds the finished product into a paper plane and sends it flying toward the clock tower.
But for all his omissions, Buckminster F. does speak awful truth. Take, for example, his mention of "false geometric principles": I must confess that I am not the most honest of clockmakers.
In my tool belt, I carry a small pen knife, and each and every day, I use it to shave away another little bit of gold from the peacock clock. I pick a different spot each time and deface it ever so precisely. I don't know why I do it. It's not for personal gain. Over the years, I have filled pillowcases with these gold flakes and forgotten about them.
That day, after I unfold my love's paper plane and see her sketch of a distorted clock tower, tilted just so to complement my face, my pen knife slips and peels away a thick slice, marring a golden garden gnome's left eyebrow. When no alarm bells blare, I shave the other eyebrow while imagining a drifting eye watching me with admiration.
The next day, she arrives just after 10:00, and I can't wait until after the show. At 27 minutes to 11:00, I leave my post. She is wearing the same blue sunglasses today, and a volcano erupts across her white t-shirt. A sticker, a name tag, resides within the volcano's plume, and the name tag reads… Eve.
Eve, a palindromic start to our fall from grace, but simply a name first and foremost.
I swallow my disappointment and ask her name anyway.
"Oh, you can call me Evangelina."
Evangelina! Angel, most of evangelize, a line ending not in "e" but "a" moving haphazardly skyward. My love never fails to break the symmetry.
I forget what I say. I must tell her my name, but again, Buckminster F. doesn't give me a real name: I am simply the crooked clockmaker, a second-rate villain, little more than a footnote in his Palindrome City series.
Evangelina frees her eyes from those blue-tinted lenses, and I nearly swoon before she pats a spot on the bench beside her. I sit and we talk of how no clock can keep true time and how no two lines are truly parallel, until she stops mid-sentence and puts her sunglasses back on. Both eyes are now staring over my shoulder.
"Evangelina?" I can't get enough of her name. "Is everything all right?"
"What did you call her?" A hand squeezes my shoulder, each perfectly proportioned finger applying a precise amount of pressure. "Her name is Eve, silly."
