THE CLOCKMAKER’S PROMISE

 In the quiet heart of an unnamed town, there lived an aging clockmaker named Elias. His workshop smelled of wood polish and time itself – a faint metallic tang of ticking towards eternity. Every clock he made was a masterpiece, each second measured precision, each time hymn to inevitably.

Elias was no ordinary craftsman. Whispers swirled through the town that he could create clocks that just didn’t tell time but controlled it. Parents warned the children to steer clear of his shop, lovers avoided its shadow on every evening stroll. But, no one could deny the beauty and charms of his creation.

One stormy night, a pale young woman entered Elias’s shop, her dark eyes hollow, her face streaked with rain. She was clutching a bundle, wrapped in a frayed blanket.

“Fix this” she demanded, placing the bundle on the counter.

It was not a clock. It was an infant, unmoving, its tiny body cold as the brass gears Elias worked with.

“I don’t fix lives,” Elias said quietly, though his fingers trembled.

The woman’s gaze burned through his eyes. “You owe me.”

Elias sighed and pulled the stiff child closer. From beneath the counter, he retrieved a heart – a delicate contraption of gold and glass. Its cogs spun faintly, powered by another worldly light.

“This will work,” he warned, “but only for a time.”

The woman nodded, desperate.

Elias worked through the night, crafting the tiniest mechanisms, threading wires finer than the child’s hair. As dawn broke, the child gasped and cried. Its heart ticked faintly, each sound an echo of Elias’s promise.

Years passed, and the child grew, but the ticking heart never stopped. It grew louder with each year; drowning out laughter, whispers and even the prolonged silence, leaving a void of emptiness inside, with a faint ticking, warning the child.

The child, now a man, came to Elias, one final time.

“Take it back,” he pleaded, empty tears streaming down his face. “I cannot sleep. I cannot think. I cannot feel it. All I hear is time slipping away.”

Elias looked at him with weary and sympathetic eyes. “I warned her,” he said, “All borrowed time must be paid.”

And so, Elias reached into the desperate man’s chest and stopped the clock.

The town found Elias’s shop empty the next morning. The clocks on the walls were still, their hands frozen to the same hour. Some say Elias left to escape his debt. Others claimed that he built himself a clock, stepped inside and wound until he disappeared.

But late at night, when the world is quiet, when the wind howls through the silence, you might hear a faint ticking beneath the earth – a reminder that time is neither borrowed nor stolen. It always collects its due.

Imaan Fatima IX-O