Black Sheep - A Novel Excerpt

I have a learning disability called dyscalculia, which is like dyslexia’s sister, only for numbers. I can’t read the face of a clock. To me, a minute feels like a year. An hour feels like a century. I lose days like buttons, years like pen caps. Time holds me nowhere, nowhere. Right now, there is nothing but the shifting depth of this sunlight, spilling through the diner’s window.

I’ve always believed that clocks offer, at best, a convenient fiction. They imply that time ticks steadily, predictably forward, when I know it does the opposite: it stretches and compresses, skips a beat and doubles back.

But then, my senses have always been distorted.

I can’t tell left from right, and so I can’t drive. Neither could my father. Being a permanent pedestrian is something we have in common and that’s what makes it horrible. Not that Los Angeles has no sidewalks. Not that I took a thirty dollar cab ride to this restaurant.

I’ve been taking lessons from this Mexican guy Carlos for three years.

“Marla, you drive like you are. Impatient.”

“How do you know I’m like that?” I asked.

Time scares me; it leaves so quick. I can’t see it coming back. As a result, I’m chronically early. I inherited that from my father, only he was chronically late. Chronically not there.

Somewhere else.