The Last of the Thirteen

         Elizabeth sighed as she glanced at the illuminated clock showing the time as 4:48 am. The blinking colon between the numbers glared at her with malice. Her eyelids drooped as though her eyelashes were tied to fishing weights. She had found herself rereading the 78th page of her thesis, to be defended before her committee later that day, for the 5th time without retaining so much as a morsel of meaning behind her own words that she had written last year: that block of time from her past when her chestnut brown eyes still dazzled daily, before they had become deadened, hollowed-out shells as they were now.