{"id":8180,"date":"2025-02-18T11:29:37","date_gmt":"2025-02-18T11:29:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sum.malmostudenter.se\/?p=8180"},"modified":"2025-02-18T12:59:31","modified_gmt":"2025-02-18T12:59:31","slug":"the-metronome","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sum.malmostudenter.se\/index.php\/2025\/02\/18\/the-metronome\/","title":{"rendered":"The Metronome"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Illustration: Julie Inksmith<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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The Metronome <\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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By:\u00a0<\/strong>Sravanthi Sunkaraneni<\/b><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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18\/02\/2025<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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“The Metronome” by Sravanthi Sunkaraneni is the 3rd place winner of the Nostalgia Short Story Competition, organised by SUM and C\u00e1lice Magazine.<\/strong><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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He fell asleep to the ticking of a metronome, my great uncle. He also carried with him his favorite music everywhere he went. It blared out of his chest pocket from a tiny cassette player, slightly muffled and with a crackle now and then, as if the cassette had been played a few too many times.<\/p>

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I remember standing in his backyard one day, trying to peer through a wall of netting in the middle of the yard to see what was on the other side. The strings of the net were too close together, making everything beyond it hazy and infinite.<\/p>

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\u201cWhat is in there?\u201d I asked him.<\/p>

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He didn\u2019t answer immediately, taking in another puff of the cigarette he was smoking.<\/p>

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Then he leaned towards me as if to whisper the answer in my ear, and I rose onto my toes, eager to hear what appeared to be a secret. I moved my ear close to his lips. They were cracked and dry and also moist and blood-red from the betel leaves he was chewing. Through warm breath thick with the smell of tobacco, he said, \u201cThere is a tiger in there.\u201d<\/p>

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I recognize now, in the memory, the hint of laughter in his crinkled eyes as he answered me.<\/p>

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But at the time, I had looked at him in alarm and run into the safety of his house while he shouted after me, laughing, \u201cIt\u2019s coming for you!\u201d<\/p>

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After that, I avoided him for the rest of my visit, hurrying away if I heard the music that always preceded him. Instead, I spent my time with my great-aunt.
I liked her. She would give me a little snack if I went into the kitchen while she was cooking. It was always a little wet when she hugged me, and she smelled like the fuel cakes she used for cooking. Smoky but with a freshness. It was how I imagined a green sapling would smell if it were burnt.<\/p>

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On my first morning at their home in the country, I started to run out into the yard barefoot. A twinge of revulsion stopped me as soon as I stepped over the threshold. My feet, so accustomed to the tiled or concrete surfaces in the city, had sunk a tiny bit into the ground. My weight shifted the soil, which filled up unpleasantly in the spaces under and between my toes. Like I was standing in wet mud. If mud was spread out, leveled, and a little green. I moved carefully, gingerly, on this strangely flattened mud, trying not to disturb it.<\/p>

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Every night, we would sleep in the yard under the sky in beds that could barely be called beds.<\/p>

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Wooden frames with strips of colorful cloth weaved together and stretched from end to end. Mine would sag under my weight as I got into it, making me cringe at the image of the legs denting the soft, flattened ground I so carefully protected.<\/p>

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Once we all lay in our beds, my great-uncle would start the metronome, which would relentlessly tick through his always-playing music as we waited to sleep.<\/p>

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As the same music played on my phone today, a couple of decades later, amidst the rush of memories, the fear of the unseen tiger, the smell of fuel cakes, and the green mud that repulsed and intrigued me, the ticking of the metronome washed over me.<\/p>

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I was used to a clock, that always ticks forward, irreversibly transforming every moment of the present into the past. Each tick urged me to move with it.<\/p>

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But the metronome moved in place. It did not freeze time; instead, it suspended me in a fluid present, oscillating an inch into the past and the future but never more. It was the peace of stillness and symmetry. And I longed for it.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“The Metronome” by Sravanthi Sunkaraneni is the 3rd place winner of the Nostalgia Short Story Competition, organised by SUM and C\u00e1lice Magazine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":8181,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[328],"tags":[339,340,294,291,337,23],"class_list":["post-8180","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-short-story-competition","tag-calice","tag-calice-magazine-2","tag-creative-writing","tag-short-story","tag-short-story-competition","tag-sum","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sum.malmostudenter.se\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8180","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sum.malmostudenter.se\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sum.malmostudenter.se\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sum.malmostudenter.se\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sum.malmostudenter.se\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8180"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/sum.malmostudenter.se\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8180\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8204,"href":"https:\/\/sum.malmostudenter.se\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8180\/revisions\/8204"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sum.malmostudenter.se\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8181"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sum.malmostudenter.se\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8180"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sum.malmostudenter.se\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8180"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sum.malmostudenter.se\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8180"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}