It’s me who guards the tower. I’ve mastered the handbook and taken residence. The work is demanding, but vital. The city entrusted me.
Our turret clock is old, its belfry damp and frigid. My duties are constant. There’s winding and lubrication. Inspection and repair. Pulleys and hammers, dials and springs. The lanterns must stay ever burning, in aid of my eyes, for a single mistake could displace the entire machine. It’s the very soul of the city, and I must maintain.
Though exalted, this work is lonely. Cold wind creeps inside and whispers of must. The mute monk is my only visitor. He climbs the stairs to replenish supplies. Never stays long. My cot is made of straw.
Dusk is my comfort. I curl by the window and stare down at the city as the sky molders sable. The distant windows glow orange-bright.
A flap of sinew, a puff of wind, and a kite bat is perched in my window. It’s as small as my hand, a ball of fluttering twine.
“Noble guardian,” it chirps with glee. “How mighty your efforts! The clock has hummed impeccably since your arrival!”
I nod at this, but it’s not for praise I toil.
“What brings you, bat?”
The creature glides to my cot, all springy and fuzzed. It wrinkles a walnut snout. “We bats have long admired the tower. Its final chimes signal our rise, and its morning’s call us home. I fly as an envoy to ask how we might thank you!”
I tilt my head, don a humble grin. “To know my work aids is all I crave.”
But the little beast squeaks insistence.
“I suppose,” I hum, “…a shop near my home made some fine bambalouni. I would enjoy, indeed, to remember its taste.”
The kite bat yips and spirals ringlets through the air.
It returns with two— a bambalouni for each claw. I pinch one by the edge, draw it to my lips . I bite. It’s just as I remember— imperfectly puffed, crispy yet soft. Bloated rings of joy, golden and fair. I gobble the rest. Fried flakes and sweet crystals melt, meld, and swirl, merry play on my tongue.
I’ll save the second for the monk.
But staring too long at its hills of dough and sugary snowfall, I snatch it from the bat and stuff it down too.
“They’re incredible!” I smack at my fingertips. “You must bring me more!”
The bat obliges. It is happy to serve, and bambalouni flows. My restraint, I see, was needlessly ascetic. This roost deserves reward.
“Hurry,” I urge, when the kite bat returns. “Bring more!”
The turret gears groan. The tower planks creak.
More bats join my employ. A line delivers all the bambalouni a guardian requires. The mute monk must fear them— he enters so stooped, and floats far from the window!
Bambalouni, bambalouni. All day long I indulge . The dough is sticky with sugar, and I push the treats to my mouth as quickly as bats bring them. Delighted chortles spill upon the flake-flecked pads of my fingers. When the clock’s pivots call for grease, I no longer need monk-delivered glop. My morsel-coated palms ooze oil in plenty.
That mute mongrel appears again. I see gears clanking in his mind as he surveys my distractions . He scowls, surely perplexed why the bambalouni delights me so.
The bell sounds, and a fright wells within me. I am bedeviled by memories of that shop, my hand reaching furtively toward a tray. Frantic shouts. A high wooden stand. And a pair of bright eyes I once knew well.
The bell clangs again, and frees me from the spell. I launch a bambalouni at the monk, damning his affliction. A wrench, after, when the soft dough thud on the wretched man’s cheek fails to satiate.
I pad toward the window. “Faster!” I yell, my shoulders thrust fully out. The bats strain through heavy air, weighed by my noble deliverance.
Weary, I droop to my cot. I tear aside the clumps of straw. I am searching for some pumping heart within. But the bed is empty. Fibrous grass, all the way through. I leap from the bed and give it a kick. It’s unworthy of this noble tower.
#
The turret clock stopped. I cared for it well, but its gears grew stubborn and old.
As I predicted, the city cannot live without the tower’s commands. Fire spreads freely. Shouts spread like a buzzing hive. The air reeks of blood.
The kite bat returns, its fur patchy and stained, as if sprayed by hot oil.
“You must flee, guardian! The city angers and comes for your head!”
I gaze with love upon my noble domain. The cot where I lay. The machine I maintained.
Shrieks ring below, and the tower stones shake.
I sprint for the stairs. But they’re wrong somehow. My feet stick. An oozing white glaze strings webs to my soles. I tumble to the curving wall, squelch against mossy grit. My skin has turned spongy, my bones gelatinous, and I melt into the tower, congeal in caving bricks.
A flutter of wings in the adjacent square of sky. A veiny kite of pink membrane and tawny fur.
“What have you done, cursed creature?” I scream. “You damned the dough and me!”
But the bat’s mute as a monk. It pings around the window’s edges, eyes like marbles. It flitters away, and I am alone.
But the eyes stay. I see them clearly now. Ghost green, amber-flecked. Bright eyes that once filled the face of the one I loved. The very same…
“I’m sorry,” I croak at the sky. There is no one to answer. Gone, gone again…
My body is nearly soup now, a doughy ring of flesh that puddles on the stairs. I hear footsteps and see torchlight. Usurpers and desecrators come to wrest away the tower.
I’ll fend them off, if I can. The clock still needs protection.
It’s my duty, I suppose.
Timbray Shafer is a traveling teacher raised in Vestal, New York. A devotee of hiking, birds, carousels, and late-night chats around a fire, he is also the author of The Rens series, Spare Mattress, and Ershiji. You can find Timbray on Facebook and Instagram @timbrayy.
Bambalouni is the winner of the Apparition Literary Magazine August Flash Fiction Challenge.
Photo by José Ignacio García Zajaczkowski on Unsplash
