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Fiction

The pocket watch didn't mean to kill anyone. Not the first time, at least.

James McCready's fingers were slick with April sweat as they fumbled the timepiece into the wrong coat pocket. The bobby's whistle cut through Southampton's morning fog, sending him scrambling through the docks like a startled rat. Any port in a storm, his mother used to say. The irony of that particular choice would haunt him until his dying day.

The coat belonged to Thomas Andrews, who noticed the unfamiliar weight against his breast just as the Titanic's propellers began their first revolution. He meant to check it then – peculiar thing, this ornate timepiece with its delicate engravings of waves and stars that seemed to shift in the light. But there were too many details requiring his attention as the ship's architect. Minor adjustments to the grand staircase. Questions about the placement of lifeboats. He'd examine it properly once they were underway.

Four days later, the watch slipped from his drowning fingers and sank into darkness, marking time as it descended through the freezing Atlantic depths. Perhaps it dreamed there, beneath crushing pressures and eternal night. Perhaps it counted the heartbeats of the ocean while fish darted through its empty chambers like forgotten memories.

It took thirteen years for the sea to return it, wrapped in a fisherman's net off the coast of Newfoundland. The net belonged to Michael O'Brien, but it was his daughter Sarah who claimed the prize. She wore it on a silver chain, fascinated by how the salt had eaten constellation patterns into the brass. She'd press it to her ear at night, imagining she could hear the phantom tick of drowned time.

"It sings sometimes," she told her father one evening, as they sat watching the sunset paint the harbor gold. "Like it's trying to remember something."

Michael would smile and shake his head, but he never tried to take it from her. He'd seen enough of the sea's mysteries to know better than to question them.

When the Depression hit in '29, Sarah traded it for bread at Murphy's Bakery. She cried as she handed it over, but there were three younger siblings at home with hollow eyes and empty bellies. The baker's son, Jimmy Murphy, took it to war with him in '42. He swore it stopped a bullet meant for his heart during the Battle of the Bulge. Came home with stories about how the watch had saved him, though no one believed the part about it glowing beneath his uniform every time the bombers flew overhead.

"Like a star fallen into my pocket," he'd insist after one too many whiskeys at the VFW. "Like it was trying to guide me home."

It passed through pawn shops and estate sales, gathering stories like barnacles. Madeline Blue, a jazz singer in Harlem, claimed it kept perfect time during her performances, even though its mechanisms had long since surrendered to rust. "That watch knows things," she'd tell her band between sets at the Cotton Club. "Knows when to hold a note, when to let it fly. Like it's got music in its bones."

Gerald Kane, a lighthouse keeper in Maine, swore it helped him predict storms. Three times it had grown ice-cold against his skin hours before unexpected squalls rolled in, giving him time to warn the fishing fleet. "It remembers the sea," he wrote in his journal. "Remembers what the water can do."

Each owner added their own marks to its surface – initials carved with pocket knives, stones set into empty screw holes, new chains when old ones broke. But something about it remained stubbornly itself, as if it held some secret purpose that none of them had quite discovered.

In 1985, it found its way to an auction house specializing in Titanic artifacts. Katherine Chen, the museum curator who bought it, spent years trying to trace its provenance. She never quite connected it to Andrews, but she felt its pull, the way it seemed to yearn for something just beyond her understanding.

"It's not just a timepiece," she explained to colleagues who questioned her obsession. "It's a survivor. A witness. Every scratch tells a story."

She documented each mark, each modification. The bullet dent from the Ardennes. The salt damage from its years beneath the waves. Tiny stones set into its face for luck. Musical notes etched beside faded initials.

"Look how the damage forms patterns," she'd say, tracing the corroded constellations with her finger. "Like a map to somewhere we can't quite see."

Her granddaughter Christine inherited it in 2023. She'd grown up hearing stories about the watch, about how it supposedly came from the Titanic though they could never prove it. She'd always felt it was trying to get somewhere, like a compass needle trembling toward true north.

When she heard about the tourist submarine planning to visit the wreck, it seemed like fate. She'd already paid her deposit when she found herself standing in her apartment, holding the watch. For the first time in its long journey, it felt... quiet. At peace.

"Hold this for me," she told her partner, Alex, draping the chain around their neck. "Just until I get back."

Alex would later reflect that we all leave pieces of ourselves behind – not just in the things we carry, but in the spaces between heartbeats where love lives. In the silence after a pocket watch stops ticking. In the stories we choose to tell.

They found comfort in that, in the months that followed. Sometimes, late at night, Alex would press the watch to their ear and imagine they could hear not just the ocean, but every hand that had ever held it. Every prayer whispered over its face. Every promise made in its presence.

"I think I understand now," Alex told Katherine at the memorial service. "Why it survived so long. It wasn't just marking time. It was collecting love. Gathering it up like shells on a beach, keeping it safe until it was needed."

The watch didn't mean to save anyone, that last time. But perhaps that had been its purpose all along – not to prevent loss, but to help us carry it. To remind us that even the heaviest things can be transformed by the journey.

The latest rumors say it's vanished again. That Alex woke one morning to find the velvet box empty, the chain coiled like a question mark on the silk lining. That somewhere out there, a pocket watch with constellation scars is finding its way to someone who needs it.

After all, we're all just trying to find our way home.

Even if we have to sink to get there.

January 22, 2025 21:35

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1 comment

L J
21:22 Jan 29, 2025

I was assigned to critique your story. First of all: there's no complaints! Its wonderful! The use of descriptive terms when talking about the watch is very poignant! I pictured every one of the watch holders. I pictured all the stories that the watch knows. It's as if "time heals everything" and we hold "time in our hands". I love how you used the Titanic museum as the reference(I've been there, all the artifacts have a story to tell). "...Four days later, the watch slipped from his drowning fingers and sank into darkness, marking time ...

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