Her mother always told her that her face would freeze that way—with her distorted, down-turned mouth revealing only the bottom teeth: an expression intended to insult her brother.  She later read that it would only happen if the clock chimed during the contortion; trivia she would recite to her brother after she’d re-set all the clocks in the house so that they would ding every other minute.  It doesn’t count if it’s not real, her brother would argue.  He cited the fifteen minute church bells as the authoritative source on time.  Fifty times a day they rang and echoed into their neighborhood. 

They listened to the same peal decades later.  The funeral was over.  It had been a short hospital course without ventilators or feeding tubes.  She’d slept in the guest chair beside her mother’s bed that last night.  Coughs would syncopate her mother’s heart rhythm, starting a chain reaction of dings and tones.  Through squinted eyes she watched her mother sleep through alarms.  Her face rested against the bed’s cold side rail until seven chimes woke her into a throbbing headache.  Her brother came, and they held their mother’s hand as she unconsciously gasped into painful silence.  She cried.  Her face fell.  At the burial, the reverberations lingered in her ears as she watched her own three children discreetly irritate each other.  Drool dripped with her tears. She was a gargoyle. She was not stone, but still the wrinkles in her down-turned mouth preserved her grimace.  Through a sagging eyelid she watched her children drop flowers in the ground.