Thursday Tales No. 4: The Hands of the Clock

They say, time and tide wait for none — yet a clock does, and so can a person. What happens when both pause? This story invites you into a moment of stillness to reflect on our relationship with time, the weight of productivity, the illusion of motion, and the quiet spaces between apathy and meaning.

The Hands of the Clock

The sun was drowning in the horizon, casting a purple as dim as ash to tone down the burnt-orange, cloudless sky. Its last rays were kissing streetlamp-lit alleys and painting skyscrapers into silhouettes. The colours of the evening were the only light that dimly lit Maya’s apartment.

Maya was sitting on a wooden chair, one of the few pieces of furniture she owned. Her hands, lying on the armrest, were loosely holding a grey porcelain mug, out of which rose the last steam of a cooling coffee. Her focusless gaze was on the white tiled floor reflecting the purpleness of the outside world.

Apart from the sound of the busy road entering through her window, and the hushing of her respiration, both of which her mind had omitted, there was nothing left but empty silence. A rhythm gradually climbed onto her incurious senses, until she lifted her head and lethargically moved her eyes in the direction of the feeble noise.

Tik…tik…tik…tik! It was the brown-framed clock, hanging on the wall that stood in front of her. Her eyes took in the image of the hour hand pointing to three, and the minute hand halted between seven and eight. The only movement was the second hand, ticking in the same spot without rotating.

It was a dead clock. It had stopped moving with the pace of the outside world more than a month ago. It had, that day, caused Maya to be late for a valuable appointment. As an effect of the listlessness she had been experiencing for months, and out of resentment toward the clock, she left it unattended — she let it suffer that state of seizure for weeks.

A fortnight later, she decided to change its battery, for days felt out-of-order without a properly functioning clock. But more than that, there was a pinch, the bitter realization that the dead clock was a metaphor for her life. She had drearily popped out a new battery of its plastic case, and had replaced the old one. She had adjusted the clock’s hands to show the correct time and hung it on the wall again.

Whether there was a problem with the clock or a malfunction in the new battery – to believe in the latter, she knew, would be foolish – after some time, the second hand ticked but had stopped rotating. Maya, who had dried her last joule of energy to help the clock breathe normally, or if she were more honest, to prevent life from using a mere clock to mock her, gave up on her very first attempt. And so, it went tik…tik…tik…

Tik…tik…tik… She was still looking at the clock, which was vainly trying to live its purpose.

Her gaze moved from the clock to her wooden desk, which sat against the clock-holding wall that separated the kitchen from the living room. Her eyes fell on the plastic case which was now holding the old battery. It was still lying among the mess of paper bundles, stationery, and a laptop left to wildly occupy the tiny space of the desk.

Then, her gaze slowly shifted to her unmade bed and a heap of weeks-old laundry on the floor by its side. As if she had failed to acknowledge a part of her house’s existence, her expressionless eyes tried to trail the span of her kitchen. She saw a pot of cold porridge on the stove placed next to a sink that was full of dishes, which had kept the silver rack from being used to its fullest capacity.

After capturing an image of the state of her house, she killed within herself a sigh which, if not for her newly developed detachment, would have leapt out of her lips and struck her with guilt and worry. She went on to stare down the ticking clock.

With the absence of time, she stared at it for long.

As if something was stirred, she raised to her feet and reached for the clock. She took it down, turned it around and scrutinized its external covering. She gravely opened one of the two drawers of her white desk, and pulled out a moderately sized, tarnished blue metal box which was left to suffocate under a pile of books she had once wished to read, but could never bring herself to. It was her father's — one of the four things he had left behind. It opened with a rusty click, and revealed a range of tools like a spanner, plier, wrench, screws and bolts. She picked out a yellow-handled screwdriver, which had faded under her father's calloused grip. She turned on her table lamp that brightened the desk enough for her to disassemble the clocks’ industrial structure.

She looked at its anatomy longer than her mind could take to read and locate the spot of default. She was trying to push herself to fix the clock, again — not for it to run normally, but for her to do justice to the three-day sick leave that was taken on the false claim of viral fever. She had spent her leave drinking coffee, eating porridge, bread and butter. Sunrise to sunset passed by, only getting a view of her sitting either in her chair or lying on her bed in deep blankness.

Now that the third day of leave was vanishing, and the blues of having to return to work was unaffectedly settling itself on her senses, she tried to make it at least a bit fruitful.

Numbly she reflowed a dry solder joint on the PCB. A “tsss” escaped her lips after she inattentively touched the hot soldering iron, and sustained a burn. This annoyance was the first fit of emotion she had experienced today, and was directed away from the burn and more at her disorganized desk, which she hastily cleared to make space for herself to work. She fumbled through her other drawer for the bottle of rubbing alcohol, and a cotton swab to clean the blackened copper coil. She also dusted and dabbed the shaft of the magnetic rotor axle with lubricant. She assembled the clock’s mechanism and fixed it on the wall.

She stood there as it went tik…tik…tik…, staring at the normally breathing clock, moving again with the speed of time.

A relaxed expression settled on Maya’s eyes, which were now looking at the drying tap in the kitchen. She walked towards the loaded sink, turned on the tap and let out a smile.

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Maya sat down with a hot mug of tea. She picked out a book from her collection, which was now neatly arranged on the compact bookshelf attached to the table. She began reading with the clock waiting to turn eight in ten minutes.

After what seemed like an hour of pure engrossment, she raised her eyes to look at the clock, which still showed ten minutes to eight. It had stopped working again. Maya stared at it, letting out a long breath. Had it been any other moment, it would have been a sigh.

She inhaled, smiled, and returned to reading the book about a man rolling a boulder up a hill.

- Mercy Rebonica