There’s a digital clock at the top of our stove. Each number is made up of digital sausage links. They’re curveless and rigid but they do the job. Twos look like backwards fives, threes like eights without Western borders.

When we first moved in, the stove was brand new and so the clock was as well. It worked well. Each sausage did its job. Together, they made up numbers.

About three years ago, our oven just stopped working. For no reason, just stopped working one day. I turned it on to 400 degrees gleefully anticipating a homemade pizza, and a half hour later it was still cold. We did what all renters do, we called our landlord.

When the repairman arrived, he sold our landlord on a warranty. Included in that warranty was the clock, which had had recently lost the top digital sausage making up the second number. I remember when it happened too. I remember trying to figure out why it was so dark at 4 PM.

The repairman didn’t have the parts to repair the clock. “You’ll have to schedule another visit. But you should know that you have a warranty. The clock’s included.” He said. “The light, too.”

Due to my Easy Bake Oven and Shrinky Dink days, and the fact that I really enjoy watching things cook, change, grow, shrink, melt, move, and brown like old paper, the light burned out a few months after we moved in.

It’s been dark ever since.

We’re outgrowing our apartment. And for the life of me, I cannot figure out who is buying up all the real estate in our neighborhood, who can afford to. I have asked a few people and no one ever really gives me a straight answer. I’m still asking.

Who is buying up all these condos and houses?

I’m still very much in the dark waiting for an answer.

But it was only recently that I began to realize that we actually have to leave here, that it’s not really a choice anymore. It’s becoming a necessity. We don’t have the room here for a toddler. And it’s not safe.

But I think the moment that I realized that we simply had to leave, was right around the time my son turned 9 months old. We were two hours north of the city and we watched him touch green grass for the very first time.

I said to Tobyjoe, “Do you realize this is the first time Em has touched grass?”

Neither one of us said another word.

Truthfully, I have no idea how to make this work. As much as I want to, as much as I’d like to, as much as we should be able to, we have no way of making this work. And up until recently, I haven’t been willing to accept that fact.

The clock on our stove has become a failure at its only function. We don’t even try and guess what time it is anymore. And at some point during the last two years, three more digital sausages burned out. I always thought I might catch one of the sausage’s final, parting moments. But other than that minor amusement, it’s been useless for a while.

What good is a clock that can’t tell time? What good is a clock that’s slowly dimming over time—quite literally?

Last night I was baking a homemade pizza when I paid our barely functioning clock a brief glance. I noticed that yet another link had gone dark. And with a chuckle it occurred to me that I may have had its function wrong all along. Perhaps it’s not there to tell us what time it is at all, or, at least not in the usual sense. Perhaps it’s letting us know in its own special way—through the dimming and eventual darkness of individual digital sausages—how much time we have left.