I stood on the piano bench, trying to rip the pendulum from my father’s un-gift of a cuckoo clock, which hung above the quiet, never-tuned baby grand. Conrad had wound the clock, purely to annoy me, on his way out to school. It would strike the early hour and launch into a clattering pantomime of some Bavarian lumber town, and this I was not prepared to accept—not again. 

The clock wouldn’t give me its pendulum, not until it had guaranteed equal injury. My eyes were level with the darkened archway where the little Aryans entered and exited, or exited and entered. Yes: they came outside when the cuckoo crowed, to chop at pines and chase themselves in a flux of apparent motivation.

Receipts on the table swirled in breeze from an open back door, adding another note of stress. I needed to pee. I’d been holding it already; now my bladder edged on riot, any bodily shift a matter of supreme delicacy. My palm was suctioned to the pendulum with sweat, fingers aching. 

Pull. Pull. The stubborn clock would chime in a few snaps of the second hand. The pendulum twitched in my fist, trying to swing. Was it the noise, or the imitation of life? Both. But the pendulum failed at last, and a hardwood span threw open, my clammy feet scooting the bench as I toppled and spun so that one shin caught the high octaves in a shriek of ivory, peeling like a banana.

I lay there with tears rising. Clutched the pendulum too tight so that something else would hurt. It was the air that stung, not the gash. I held the skinned leg to my chest as my other foot pushed the wall.

Conrad slept under planetarium stickers that barely glowed. My son, he walks into strangers’ houses as if they’re meant to be explored. When he openly defies me, I am lost in a fog of my own sputterings. I have neither the means nor will to punish this monosyllabic giant.

Across town, Deputy Mayor Hazel Kearns was reviewing accounts ahead of my impeachment. She arrives at dawn to do work I am likely to botch. I fear I’ve taken advantage of her in every way I can, and I say I fear to deny and discredit the throbbing certainty that I have.

My wife, who lives with an idol of stadium rock, cannot divorce me because our marriage certificate has been lost. By me. As mayor, I have brought no end to the plague of unidentified animal skeletons washing up on the beach.

Above, gears commenced to click and whirr. The clock didn’t need the pendulum to work, evidently. I examined the spoon-shaped wood in my hand with disappointment. My right foot flexed on the wall and produced a gravity that held it there. The jaunty peasant song began. The bird.

I fell, I fell, it sang.

When time was done celebrating itself, a raw silence permeated the room. Easing my hurt leg straight, I gently put a second foot on the wall, where it stuck as though to solid ground. Testing this unreal privilege, I took a vertical step.

“The Ebenezer Effect” is a not-so-new short story just published in the exceedingly new Similar Peaks. It’s about luck, privilege, politics, sex, parenting, the Civil War, beach towns, the environment, growing pains, ritual sacrifice, time, reality, impossibility, Calvinism, and walking up walls.