The hourglass was 20 feet high. Banded with bronze sheeting, and interlaced with stout tinted glass, it loomed over the jungle. There were panthers and alligators prowling about down there. Up here was only the hourglass — and a man.

The man disturbed the sand by moving to one side like a sand-surfer. His eyes: [hooded, dark] looked out of the hourglass at the jungle below. He realized that the mid-point of the hourglass (he was in the top half) was too narrow for him to fall through. His outstretched palms cupped the ever-flowing sand of the giant 20-foot-tall hourglass. Angrily, emotionally, he beat his fists against the glass of the upper half. No results.

The man swam through the trickling sand to the other side of the hourglass. What would happen when the sand had all run out? Why, he would die. It was that simple and that obvious. There was a surreal heat building in the hourglass as if someone had lit a good-sized fire and he was seated too close to it. He began to sweat.

As the sand continued to mark off the last segments of a dry age (and the approaching end of his life!), the man started to sing. He had a powerful voice and the glass vibrated from the force of his song. For a moment he thought that he could actually vocally-explode his way out of here … then the vibrating quieted down, and then the hourglass completely stilled. The sand flowed on.

With his fist raised above his head, the man let loose a fistful of sand into his own hair. Let him bathe in Time! The man’s hair, collecting grains of sand like dry shampoo, was lathered up into a sandy-yellow foam and he felt exhilarated, transformed.

Then the last of the sand left the top half of the hourglass, and the man was stricken, his long body laid out on the curving surface of the hourglass top’s bottom, electrifying jabs of pain coming quicker and quicker through him until his heart, finally, gave out.

He was dead.

the end