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Kronii woke up with a start, it was 5:38 am. She knew without even glancing at the glowing red numbers on her nightside table. She felt the tick of the clock in her heart. She felt every grain of sand in her hourglass. It raked across her aching mind and wormed its way into every fold of her brain. No pearl formed from this irritant, only a deep and pressing need for coffee and to strangle someone. A flash of gold lit up her thoughts before disappearing in a mocking giggle. Kronii fisted the blankets under her and threw them off. No sense crying about it. She wanted to cry about it so fucking bad. Instead she wandered into the bathroom across the hall. The cracked mirror showed her disheveled blue hair and deep bags under her eyes. The flickering lightbulb above her dimmed and her reflection’s mouth stretched into a feral grin, teeth lengthened into cruel fangs and eyes shimmered with an oil slick of iridescent pink that made her double over as nausea wracked her body. The sand in her hourglass stuttered violently, picking itself up from where it lay and straining back upwards before floating for a second and falling down again. The soft trickle accompanied by loud retching and coughing in the bathroom. Knees planted on either side of the stinking toilet bowl, Kronii contemplated killing herself.
On the third day of her newest case, Kronii found the missing person. The girl had been driven thirteen miles down the highway from the city. Tracking eyewitnesses and questionably acquired CCTV footage had not been easy, but the dull work was doable even in her sleep deprived state and the urgency kept her awake. Kronii felt the sand under her skin. Fifty-six hours twenty-four minutes and twelve seconds since she last slept. The ticking of a pocket watch that swung like a pendulum over her head. Kronii found the girl in the evening of the third day. She had been driven down the highway thirteen-. She sighed. She’d done this part already. She opened the dumpster behind the decrepit motel and fished the black plastic bags out. They sloshed uncomfortably, and stunk in a way that made her wish she was anywhere else. Her mouth watered. Her teeth itched. The sand flowed.
On the third day. Kronii hadn’t slept for five hundred and twenty-six hours thirty-eight minutes and eight seconds. She opened the dumpster and pulled out the bag of girl and garbage and girl and garbage and girl. She closed her mouth so the saliva gathering wouldn’t pour out, swallowing the bile that threatened to force itself out.
“Shame. I thought you’d have it this time.”
Kronii blinked, the phantom in a black and golden suit vest swung its pocket watch around its finger and caught it again. The sand wasn’t flowing.
“It doesn’t have to be like this, you know?”
Kronii doesn’t know. Her head is full of sand. She didn’t know. Her blue jacket was tattered, her baseball cap had been lost somewhere. Kronii was so tired, maybe she could just lie down for a minute. She clenched her fist so hard blood trickled down her fingers. She bit her cheek so hard that her tongue filled with the sweet taste of iron and ambrosia. Kronii was so tired of holding back. She whispered a single word. The phantom’s oily pink eyes crinkled with mirth. Kronii fell.
On the first day, Kronii lifted her mouth from the body of a large man. He was waiting in the parking lot of a local park. He clawed at the van doors that couldn’t open from the inside. He slapped weakly at the arms that held him down and whimpered at the feeling of teeth digging out all the red and white and purple and blue that they could reach. A bone crunched as it splintered in her mouth, She looked up in surprise. Kronii saw a vision as the sun caught the tinted window before her. It had eyes pink like an oil slick and fangs long like a predator. Its blue hair dripped with gore and its face was painted red. She recoiled in fear. Not of the state the beast was in, but the expression it wore. Of pure rapturous bliss. The sand was hot as it caressed her scales.
On the third day, Kronii is walking down the street to her favorite cafe. It was unfortunate that she had to tell the panic stricken mother that the case had gone cold, but that was the job sometimes. Not every ending was happy. She adjusted her ball cap over her blue hair and zipped up her pristine blue jacket against the cold of the early spring. The door swung open right as she reached for the handle. A woman stepped out, her blond hair shining in the afternoon sunlight. It looked like liquid gold.
“My apologies. I hadn’t seen you.” She spoke with an accent Kronii had never heard before, with a strange pronounced click of her teeth.
“It’s fine.” Kronii just wanted to get inside and get caffeinated so that she could start work on a new case.
“Too bad about the girl. I thought this time was definitely going to work out.” Kronii tensed, her hand reaching into her pocket to clutch her pocket knife. An odd feeling niggled at her. Like sand caught between your fingers.
“Who are you, are you with an agency? Or the cops?”
The woman laughed, her gloved hand barely covering her mouth, something about her teeth was off. Kronii blinked. Maybe she was British. The accent wasn’t right but it was close.
“Something like that, why don’t I help you out, Kronii? A simple exchange. You need to make rent this month don’t you? I need a little helper.” Kronii was trembling now, this woman was crazy. Crazy and had some sort of file on her. Was this blackmail? Was it the mafia? Who knows what sort of shit this woman would want her to do.
“Go fuck yourself, lady. I'm not helping you with shit. No matter what kind of dirt you got on me.” The woman’s eyes sharpened, her brow pinching. Her blue eyes flashed, a drop of pink filming over them like oil. What the fuck was going on?
“Oh dear, no, my little Gator. I’m afraid you already said yes. You just haven’t realized.” Kronii pitched backwards suddenly as the world tilted. Her arms flailed as she fell off the sidewalk and into a whirlpool of sand. A watch ticked above her, a phantom grinned wide and hungry, a mouth split under her as a whale of an alligator broke the surface of the sand and snapped its teeth shut around her. She saw sparks in the dark, each one coalescing into a great branch. They reached out infinitely, grouping together and splitting apart. The roar of sand flowing drowned out Kronii’s scream as she felt herself break apart and reform. She lived a thousand million lifetimes. Each one a fraction of a fraction of a second, each one ended with her meeting the phantom. Each one ended with a drop of sand in the desert. She was a grain of a grain of a grain on a chessboard that stretched forever, a shadow of a great green beast hanging over her.
“I thought this was the time.” The phantom spoke with disinterest as it eyed the grain before it. “She barely shattered at all.” It held up a blue hourglass, webbed with cracks and leaking sand into the dark. “Oh well.” It dropped the broken timepiece into the waiting maw of the gator that formed around it. It swung its watch chain around one finger and caught the golden pocket watch. Its eyes dripped with pink poison.
“There’s always more of them.”
Amelia clicked the watch’s button.