When the Night Comes by Favel Parrett Page A

sleep,” he said and he lit another cigarette.
    He was leaving again in a few days. It was hardly any time—no time. Getting stuck in the ice had put everything out, the whole schedule for the summer. Everything was different now.
    â€œNo matter how long I sit here,” he said, “I cannot decide. Should I send his watch home, or keep it safe here with me?”
    I wasn’t sure if he was asking me, and I didn’t know the answer. I sat down quietly on the chair next to his.
    The watch was on the table, an old-fashioned one, like the watch my grandpa wore. Only his was gold and a gift for twenty-five years of service at Smiths Industries, where he’d made clocks and watches and airplane black boxes. Soren’s watch didn’t look like it was gold, but it had a nice clean face, and it looked like a good watch. One that would last for a long time.
    Bo picked it up and held it. It looked small in his hand.
    â€œWhen we got him ready,” he said, “when we took him down to the freezer and wrapped him up, I took the watch from his wrist. He wore it so tight, always. There was a mark on his wrist where he wore it. He never took it off—he was afraid to lose it. It was his father’s watch. He always wore it, for all the time I knew him.”
    Bo put his cigarette out. He rubbed his forehead.
    â€œI don’t know why I took it, but I couldn’t leave it. I didn’t want it to stop ticking.”
    He turned to me and smiled then, a strange smile.
    â€œWhen I hold the watch in the palm of my hand like this,” and he showed me his open hand, the face of the watch right in the center, “I can feel the ticking through my skin—and it’s like the heartbeat of a little bird when you hold one, a pulse that you might miss if you are thinking about other things. If you are not concentrating. And I keep thinking, shouldn’t a watch be more fragile than a man?”
    Bo wiped one of his eyes with the back of his hand and then he wiped his nose too. He looked up at me, blinking—maybe decided now.
    â€œSoren was my good friend,” he said. Then he got up. He said it was no good sitting here in the night, the two of us. He said that if we had some hot chocolate then maybe we would feel like sleep again. When he left the room and went into the kitchen to heat the milk in the little black saucepan that he had bought especially because he said our saucepans were terrible and he couldn’t make anything right with them, I carefully picked up the watch from the table. It was warm from being in Bo’s hand.
    I closed my eyes so I could feel the ticking there against my palm—like the heartbeat of a little bird. But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t feel it. I couldn’t feel the cogs of the watch moving inside.

ONIONS
    T here was a pile of onion slices on the counter, a pyramid of them—thin and see-through. Bo looked up at me but his hands did not stop moving. He kept slicing onions, running them back and forth quickly against a large metal slicer. He was slicing so fast, the sunlight through the porthole caught the particles of onion juice in the air, and there was a whole rainbow of it there in the galley.
    Bo’s eyes were puffy and red and my eyes started to water. The acid of the onions was like a wall, invisible but there all the same.
    â€œGo and stand near the sink,” Bo said, still slicing. “Look down into the hot water.”
    The metal sink was half-full of steaming water and I leant over it. I could feel the warmth of the steam against the skin on my face. It felt good.
    â€œStare into the water. Try not to blink.”
    I stared down, my eyes wide, until the water became blurred and the edges of the sink rounded and then were gone altogether. Then there was just a body of water—my eyes staring down into a moving body of water.
    I blinked. The onion sting was gone. I stood up, my nose running.
    Bo was on