Word of the Day Challenge: Oxymoron

Galvan Smith lives every second that the clock  will spare him.

He goes  work, he attends Church, he walks the dog and helps his wife keep house. After that seeing to his chores, he tends to his garden and plays with his children. He  paints pictures too.

He is partial to watching sunsets and to the tree out behind their house , so they turn up in his artwork and his sketches. The same tree and the same sunsets always turn up like clockwork on in Galvan’s sketch books and canvases and he signs each one with improbably small block letters.

Galvan even plays the violin.

If Galvan had a fault,   if you could call it a fault, I’d have to say his fault was the way he would take out his pocket watch to check on the time. And when he walked by the calender in the kitchen he would tap the current date as he walked by. He did these things every single time, like clockwork.

Elmira,  Galvan’s wife,  watched the same seconds tick by that Galvan did. She saw the same dates on the calender. She walked the same dog and tended to the same garden and she cared for the children too and sometimes she played with them too

Sometimes she sketched pictures of the tree behind their house and sometimes she painted the Sunset , but when she heard Galvan play the violin she would wish he would stop because the music Galvin played sounded like the wind as it blew through the cracked and broken windows in their parlor and from the windows that didn’t close anymore in the kitchen and through the hallways that nobody has walked through for almost 100 years.

Sometimes from the top of the stairs, or from kitchen wrapped in the shadows of the past, Elmira can see the music push the dust off of the empty bookshelves  in Galvan’s study and from the lentil above the bedroom doors where none of them have slept for years.  Even if she closes her eyes she can see it sweep through the nursery where the phantasmal  children play and she can hear  it echo in the corners of the sitting room where Elmira takes her tea.

The music drifts through their house, as Elmira knows, all on it’s own and that always makes her a little sad.

Nobody is really there to hear the music when the last note dies and fades away because when you share a home where the dead are still living and time means nothing anymore,  you will  always die alone.