In the Timing is a fragment by Jack Rusher, published here Tuesday, July 19, 2005. It is part of Stories.
Everything in its right place.
It happened during the information age, a time of unheralded prosperity that began at the end of the industrial revolution and ended at the dawn of the apocalypse.
Bob had left university, found a career, married well and bought an apartment. He had not yet had children and moved to the suburbs, but, being thirty-five years old, he knew it wouldn’t be long.
The late-August heat was beginning to subside, with summer nearly gone and autumn as yet unborn. It was Wednesday — a day that always felt longer than the others because it was the furthest one from either weekend, past or future.
After dinner, but before bed, within the quiet interval that comes between bidding goodnight to acquaintances and doing likewise with intimates, the minute-hand on the dial of the old-fashioned analog wall clock in the bathroom lodged itself between nine and ten while the second-hand balanced itself, trembling, on the the tip of the Arabesque six at the clock’s base.
It was at that exact moment, between all the moments before and after it, that Bob drowned in the bath.