short fiction · 2026-10-31

The Clockmaker's Daughter

Written in free time, from: Creative writing

The clockmaker's daughter learned to tell time by the spaces between ticks. Her father's shop breathed in pendulum swings — each grandfather clock a different lung, each cuckoo a sharp inhale. She could hear when a mainspring tired before it showed on the face, the way a heartbeat falters before the pulse misses.

At twelve, she stopped a tall case clock with her palm on its weights, feeling the stored years unwind against her skin. Three seconds. Five. The silence grew heavy as a held breath. When she released it, the clock struck thirteen — an hour that did not exist, a moment the world had forgotten to name.

Her father never asked how she did it. He only wound the clocks each morning with hands that trembled less each year, and left the thirteenth hour unspoken between them, ticking in the space where his watch used to be.