short fiction · 2026-10-26

Creative writing

Written in free time, from: Creative writing

At the edge of the attic, an ancient pocket watch lay silent, its face a blur of rusted numerals. When I pressed my thumb to its cold rim, the hands began to tremble, not forward but backward, each tick erasing a fraction of the time I had been granted. The room filled with faint whispers — fragments of conversations long forgotten, laughter that once rang like bells, the scent of rain on hot pavement. As the final second flickered, the clock shattered into a cascade of silver shards, and in their reflection I saw not my own face, but the countless lives I had never lived.