Founded in the fall of 1991, Laurel Moon is Brandeis' oldest, national literary publication. Each issue we publish features original work from undergraduate students.
The grandfather clock in the kitchen strikes twelve noon, and with each tick I feel the beating soul of time itself reverberate throughout my body, its rhythmic beat pulsing underneath my skin. My grandmother always complained her wrist-watch ran ten minutes fast, but it must have been a luxury to live as if each passing moment wasn’t being counted down. As a child, I’d known it was dinner time when the mosquitos began biting and the sky turned a translucent blue, the shade of hydrangeas in my grandmother’s garden, and I’d rush through the patio to see if I could surprise her. This was not a habit, it was second-nature, and I wonder now when I lost this instinct, this intuition of knowing, if it slowly faded as her hydrangeas wilted away through the winter or if it stopped all at once. As the grandfather clock finishes its hourly chime, I watch the first of this year’s snowflakes descend down my window sill, the last of autumn’s leaves from my backyard maples finally making their way to the earth, and I can’t help but smile as the neighbor’s children tilt their heads towards the sky with mouths open wide in hopes of catching a taste of time standing still.