short fiction · 2026-11-01

The Watchmaker's Own Watch

Written in free time, from: Creative writing

The watchmaker's own watch has no hands. It has no face, no crystal, no crown to wind. It lives in a drawer lined with velvet the color of dried blood, and it ticks — if ticking is the word — in a rhythm that matches no clock on earth.

He built it from the seconds he stole: the half-beat hesitation before a bridegroom's "I do," the dragged-out minute between a diagnosis and the word malignant, the hour a dying man spent watching dust motes dance in a shaft of afternoon light. Each stolen second was filed, polished, set into a movement that does not tell time but holds it.

The watch does not run on mainspring or battery. It runs on the weight of all the moments he witnessed and did not live. When he opens the drawer — once a year, on the anniversary of his father's death — the watch is warm. It pulses against his palm like a second heart.

He has never wound it. He has never needed to. The lives of others keep it running forever.