Story – “The Clockmaker and the Missing Time”
Tom Toth never liked mornings. Not because he hated waking up, but because the mornings in his town were… unfinished. Clocks ticked backward in the corner shops. Sunlight arrived late and left early. People whispered about missing hours like they were lost pets.
Tom worked in a small clock repair shop, the only place in town where time seemed to obey the rules. One rainy Tuesday, a curious customer arrived: a girl whose eyes flickered like broken hourglasses. She placed a golden watch on the counter.
“This stopped at 3:17 yesterday,” she said. “I think it swallowed something… maybe time itself.”
Tom examined the watch. Every tick echoed in his chest like a distant heartbeat. He wound it slowly, and suddenly, the world outside paused. Rain hung in midair. A cat froze mid-leap. And the girl? She smiled, as if she had been waiting decades for this moment.
“You can fix it,” she whispered. “But only if you’re willing to follow where it goes.”
Without thinking, Tom stepped through the glass face of the watch.
He landed in a city made entirely of clocks—towers of pendulums, streets of swinging hands, rivers of spilled sand from hourglasses. Time flowed like a river, but backwards, sideways, and sometimes in circles. Somewhere in the city, a shadow waited: the thing that had eaten the hours of his town.
And Tom realized, with a thrill he couldn’t name, that he had never really started his day. Not until now.
