He could still hear the ringing of the bells of when the great clock struck three as he walked through the narrow side walk.  He hadn’t noticed that his cigarette had gone down to the butt.  It was mid April but the bitter cold still burned the skin at his neck and wrists.  He kept glancing at his crappy wrist watch.  The glass was cracked and the nine had fallen off in the days after his aunt Marge with her eyebrows too curled had given it to him soon after his sixteenth birthday.  He knew the time, he knew it was five minutes after three, but he still glanced at it, he glanced at it as often as he did when he was in history class with Mr. Ronson, who kept muttering dreadful platitudes on a time that no one really cared about. Mr. Ronson whose brown wool suit coat that always looked as if it had been dragged through centuries and his brown bow tie that was never quite straight just as his comb over that never really hid the patch of pale skin on his head.  Mr. Ronson who would incessantly play with the ring on his finger even though we all know that his wife left him for a younger man  ”she was a bitch man”. But it’s not really her fault, the man never spoke up, even when a student audibly cusses at a lesson, all he does is keep lecturing at his desk, and turn the ring back and forth around his finger, as if all that mattered to Mr. Ronson was that the ring was there.  Then when the boy could take no more, he would glance at the clock on the wall, the clock that always read 12:24.

After all, he is an impatient child.  He is always impatient while walking down the desolate main street.  He would bump into a stranger and mutter a silent an apology for he was too preoccupied with wishing the sidewalk could move faster under his feet.  He glanced at his watch again, he knew it was 3:10, an so did the watch. ‘Almost there he thought to himself’.