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“But why are the clocks melting?” he asked, tilting his head to the side and studying the painting on his easel.
“I don’t know, my love,” Gala answered, coming to stand behind him and looking over his shoulder at the still-wet work. “Perhaps you were trying to say something about time.”
“Perhaps,” he muttered absently while his eyes continued to dart across the canvas, devouring every detail. “Why don’t I remember painting it?”
“I don’t know,” she purred in his ear. “Maybe you were so taken with the muse — ”
“You are my muse, Gala.” He turned to face her, smiling. “This painting will make me famous.”
“I’ve no doubt.”
“I never painted anything like this before I met you. I’ve never been so inspired, so…”
“Happy?” she supplied.
“Happy. Yes, happy.” He leaned over to kiss her and she wrapped her paint-smudged hands around his back, holding him against her. His long, thin moustache tickled her cheek while their lips danced against one another. When at last they broke their embrace, he turned once more to regard the painting and she tucked her hands into her pockets. “I just wish I remembered painting it.”
“Perhaps then,” she said, with a smile on her lips and in her eyes, “you ought to title it something not to do with time, but The Persistence of Memory.”
“I may at that,” Salvadore laughed, and shook his head. “Yes, I may at that.”
Rhonda Parrish is a writer and poet who hates writing her own bio. She is also the editor of Niteblade Magazine. You can find out more about her at her webpage, Rhonda Parrish dot Com.
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20 Responses to “WHY ARE THE CLOCKS MELTING? • by Rhonda Parrish”
Comments
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July 18th, 2009 at 12:39 am
Apart from the artist having a different first name – Salvadore – this could almost be about Salvador Dali, who painted a picture very much like that with much the same title.
July 18th, 2009 at 12:40 am
(Or does Spanish have a vocative, that wasn’t dropped as is usual in translations?)
July 18th, 2009 at 1:50 am
All a bit too predictable, for me. Also the dialogue gave the impression that the author was searching a bit too hard for words to replace ‘said’ – we had ‘answered’, ‘muttered’, ‘purred’, ‘supplied’and ‘laughed’.
July 18th, 2009 at 3:23 am
I liked this creative little story. It fits well into the Humour/Satire category in which it was listed.
July 18th, 2009 at 5:48 am
Seems like a rather pointless fictionalization [is that a word?] of a real incident. Yes, it could have happened with this dialog, but so what? Usually this sort of thing is a jumping-off place for a full story, as a standalone piece it is lacking.
July 18th, 2009 at 7:00 am
What?
July 18th, 2009 at 7:06 am
…………
July 18th, 2009 at 7:06 am
…………………………..
July 18th, 2009 at 8:01 am
I really liked this story. I’m not an art buff but I figured this had something to do with a real painting. I love the idea of a muse who messes wit her artist’s head and makes him do things he doesn’t remember.
July 18th, 2009 at 8:14 am
“Real paintings” of all kinds take days, weeks, months, sometimes longer to finish. It would have to be longer than a momentary forgetting. A sketch might be quick, but a sketch would not cause the “artist” to believe it would make him famous.
Is it a murder?
July 18th, 2009 at 10:44 am
The humor and/or satire are flying well below my RADAR. Dali did create a painting of clocks melting and it was titled “The Persistence of Memory.” He did have a wife named Gala. This reads more like historical fiction than anything else, though Dali was already well-known by the time he painted this.
–John
July 18th, 2009 at 11:33 am
[...] flash fiction piece, “Why are the Clocks Melting?” is up at Everyday Fiction today. So far the readers haven’t been very fond of it, but [...]
July 18th, 2009 at 1:01 pm
After all the previous GREAT pieces of fiction, I fond this one lacking. Sorry!
July 18th, 2009 at 1:24 pm
I like the imaginative approach to speculating about what might have inspired the title of a famous piece.
For me, the essence of the story is in this line: “maybe you were taken with the muse –”
There are some minor flaws in the story – dialog tags, spelling of his name, timing relative to his fame. However, I really enjoyed the idea that over the period of months taken to create the painting, perhaps the muse consumed the painter to the point of forgetting/losing time while he was painting a subject that could be perceived as showing the elusive quality of time.
July 18th, 2009 at 1:26 pm
Is Dali still alive and enlisting in the fiction corp? Did he write this himself as a humor? In the painting the melting clocks were watches as saddles on melting horses. Maybe it means all the horses will be gone. Maybe he wants to forget that particular painting which became famous in the U.S. when it was published as a centerfold by Reader’s Digest. Did you notice the line “she wrapped her paint-smudged hands around his back”? Is this a confession of his taking the credit for her work?
Is someone trying to say something?
July 18th, 2009 at 6:55 pm
I sort of agree with Jim Hartley. I don’t think the story was pointless fictionalization, but it’d be nice to see a longer version of this piece. It made me laugh though
.
July 18th, 2009 at 8:42 pm
I thought it quite entertaining, even though I saw the punch line coming from the first paragraph. How do we know how people get their inspirations? And how can we know for sure precisely when Dali painted his famous melting watches? This was a fun “What if” story.
July 18th, 2009 at 11:57 pm
Sharon asked “How do we know how people get their inspirations?”
This particular one could have happened quite easily; something very like it actually happened to me once. After I had been caught in the rain, a trace of moisture got into my watch and tended to fog up the glass. So I put it in front of a gas fire, at a distance I found merely hot, in the hope that it would bake the moisture out. However, the glass was in fact plastic and melted down onto the watch face.
July 19th, 2009 at 7:44 am
P.M. – This would explain a title “The Persistence of Time” because the melting face would lock the pointers to a single unmoving time, but it would not explain the title “The Persistence of Memory” unless the event was so catastrophically, traumatically, shocking to the owner of the watch that he couldn’t release the event from his mind. Luckily, Gala, with her paint-smeared hands was there to mimic, in paint, a clock face with hands pointing to a different time on a nearby piece of canvas. This might have helped restore him to sanity and give persistent memory a double emphasis.
July 19th, 2009 at 8:17 am
i like it. i don’t think it really matters when Dali became famous… the piece is speculative, and it takes something well known and provides a potential alternate history for it.
the pace flows well, and Gala is well-written.