The first thing that Lydia noticed when she woke was that the ticking had gotten louder.  She groaned and pulled her pillow over her head, burying her nose in the mattress, but it continued undampened.  When she had first noticed the ticking over a month ago, it had been almost subliminal, only intruding upon her most silent moments.  It was almost soothing, like a heartbeat.  But now she could clearly hear each grinding gear, even over the whistle of the 6:00 train.

     Lydia knelt on her dingy mattress, put her hands gingerly to her temples, then rubbed them almost viciously across her face, startling her skin into consciousness.   She stood -- none too steadily -- and walked across the bare wooden floor of her studio apartment, feeling it creak and rock beneath her like a tiny boat on an empty sea.
 

     She pulled a black turtleneck sweater over the dingy grey slip that served as both underwear and pyjamas, then stepped into the crumpled hoop of a peasant skirt -- black also, with tiny crimson flowers -- and pulled it up, pinning the elastic waistband to the slip.    When she left home, she was plump and rounded from years of good cooking and little activity.   6 months later, when she dropped out of school, her clothes were already loose.  Now they hardly fit at all.

     Her breath made clouds of frost in front of her as she hurried down the concrete steps of her indifferently whitewashed complex.   The last remnant of grimy snow on the ground had melted yesterday, but frozen overnight into filthy mud-brown ice.   Shivering, she stuffed her hands into the skirt's vast hidden pockets, encountering a crumpled envelope with her grasping left.

    It was the letter, of course, the letter from her mother.  It had come in the mail yesterday, and she hadn't opened it, just thrust it into her pocket in the hopes that it would disappear and she wouldn't have to read it.  But here it was, as certain and cold and real as the smoky day beginning around her, and she couldn't put it off any more.

 My dearest Lyds,

 Your father and I are very concerned that you're not attending school this semester.  I don't want to sound like a nag, but you know the longer you tick put it off tock the harder it is to tick get right back tock into the swing of things.  We hope that you tick are doing tock and tick says to say tock and tick tock tick tock tick tock tick tock tick tock tick tock...

    Lydia crumpled the letter and released it from her hand, letting the wind catch it and send it winging away.  What is it about parents that make them want to tell us what we already know?  She could, she mused,  call her mother and tell her that she wasn't in school because she didn't have anything to be in school for: no four-year plan, no oriented goals, not even the hope of an active social life.  She could tell her about stagnation, desperation, and about spinning hamster wheels, and endless treadmills, and then she could tell her about the ticking.

    "Oh yes, did I mention that I'm ticking, mom?  Funniest thing.  Just keeps getting louder and louder.   Pretty bizarre, if you think about it.  Your daughter's a stopwatch."

    And then?  Mom would splutter in a vaguely concerned fashion, then Dad would come on and say something about sticking with it and getting right tick back into school, tock, Princess, and don't tick when you should tock and all that, and eventually she was quite certain that she would have to scream loud and long and for no par-tick-ular reason and what would that solve?

   "Christ!" she yelled, startling a man in tiny jogging shorts and eliciting a sharp rat-a-tat of barking from his four-legged companion.  The ticking was getting louder again, and before she knew it she had begun pumping her legs in time with the beats, soaring higher and higher until her toes touched the leaves in the nearby trees.   She began to get dizzy, and bright red and orange flashes began to alternate with the grays of the overcast day.  Back and forth, back and forth, higher and higher, but never getting farther than the length of the chain, always returning to the same spot.

     Lydia was carried away.   She sprawled on the flat car, chest heaving, pulse pounding in her ears, keenly aware of the thousand aches and pains throughout her body and the warm sticky blood coagulating on her knees.  She didn't know where she was going, just that the train was pointed east and it was going somewhere.  And so was she.  And Lydia wasn't ticking anymore.