The Clockmaker's Daughter

The brass door creaked open as the girl stepped out into the sunshine, blinking at the morning light as though it were something new. In, her left hand, she held a small velvet pouch. In her right, a brass gear, no larger than a coin, glinting like a secret in the light. She had never left the shop before. For seventeen years, she lived beneath the ticking clocks. The shop smelled always of oil, dust, and the woodsmoke that curled from the iron stove in winter. Her father, the town's clockmaker, crafted time into neat packages and hung them on the walls for others to measure their lives by. But he had never let her outside.

"It's not time yet," he would say, winding a pocket watch that no customer ever claimed. He said it with sorrow in his voice, and she never asked why.

But now the clocks had all stopped. She had found him that morning in his chair, hands folded on his chest, his work apron still dusted with brass filings. Peaceful. Still. The kind of stillness that meant the world no longer required ticking. And so she stepped outside, into the unknown, heart beating like a bird cupped in two trembling hands. The town was not at all how she imagined it. It was quieter. Softer. The buildings sagged with age, and vines climbed the stone corners like they were seeking forgotten stories. A boy across the street looked up from painting a shutter and waved. She stared. People waved in real life?

She wandered until the cobbled paths gave way to wildflowers and the edge of the forest. Her father had told her of this place.

"Where the sun tells truer time than the clocks ever could."

She knelt in the grass, opened the pouch, and took out the pieces. The gear, the glass face, the slender hands, no longer ticking. She buried them under a yew tree, where time had never been marked, only felt. Then she sat there for a long while, watching the shadows shift. The sun was warm on her back, and the wind carried no questions. Just the scent of honey and wild thyme. For the first time in her life, she wasn't listening for the chime of the hour.

She was being.

When she finally rose and turned back to the path that led home, if she could still call it that, she felt no fear. The world was no longer a question she didn't know how to ask. She stepped out into the sunshine once more, this time toward something.

Toward life, unwound.

*The Hourglass Orchard

The next morning, she woke to birdsong, not bells. The house felt emptier than the shop ever had. Without the gentle ticking of pendulums and escapements, silence had settled in like dust. But it wasn't a lonely silence, it was expectant. As if the walls were holding their breath, waiting for her to move.

She found his journal beneath the floorboard where he always kept the broken tools he couldn't bear to throw away. It was bound in cracked leather, paged yellowed and full of strange diagrams. Clockfaces with no numbers. Gears shaped like moons. Ink sketches of trees that bore not fruit, but tiny timepieces in place of apples. At the very back of the journal was a map. A small one, hand-drawn and wrinkled at the folds. In the margin, scrawled in her father's looping script, were the words:

"Where time grows wild, and endings return to seeds."

She didn't hesitate. She packed a satchel with bread, a canteen of cool spring water, and the last pocket watch he had ever made, the one that never ticked, no matter how she wound it. The path on the map led beyond the forest's edge, past the meadow and into a tangle of silver-leaved trees that shimmered strangely in the breeze. It was late afternoon when she found the orchard. But it was unlike any orchard she had ever read about in books. The trees here were ancient and knotted, their bark smooth like stone, and each one bore a single glass orb suspended from its branches by golden thread. Some were the size of an egg, others as large as a melon, but all were filled with sand, some nearly empty, others half full. And they moved, slowly. Imperceptibly. The sand shifted without touch, as though each orb lived by its own rhythm.

Time, she realized, was alive here.

She walked between the trees, feeling a hum beneath her feet. And then she heard it, like a faint ticking, or a heartbeat, pulsing softly from deep within the earth.

She stopped in front of a small tree at the orchard’s center. Hanging from its branch was an hourglass no bigger than her palm. It shimmered with a faint blue glow. Her name was etched into the wood of the branch above it.

Not carved. Grown.

She reached up and touched the hourglass and in that instant, she remembered.

Not from her own memory, but his. Her father’s.

She saw his hands building the clock shop, not for business, but as a shelter.

She saw a woman with the same eyes as hers, slipping away, her spirit caught in the balance of time and magic, saved in a piece of the orchard.

She saw him bargain with time itself to give his daughter a life outside of its wild, unraveling grip. To shelter her behind ticking walls until the right day. Until the orchard called her home.

She opened her eyes, tears streaming, and the hourglass in her hand began to glow brighter and then dissolve into sand that trickled between her fingers and disappeared into the wind.

A soft voice rustled through the trees.

“Your time is your own now.”

And just like that, the orchard fell still.

She stood beneath the twilight canopy, heart full, and smiled for the first time, not because she should, but because she could.

With the map tucked into her pocket and the stars beginning to wake overhead, she turned back toward the path.

And once again, she stepped out into the sunshine, only this time, it followed her.

By the time she returned to town, the sun had already set. But the streets were not dark.

Lanterns glowed on every doorstep—warm, flickering amber—and the townsfolk stood outside their homes as though waiting for something, though none of them could say what.

She walked barefoot down the cobbled road, her shoes slung over her shoulder, her skirts dusted in pollen and stardust. A few heads turned. One child pointed.

“That’s the clockmaker’s girl,” someone whispered.

But the words didn’t sting the way they once did.

An old man approached, cap in hand. His name was Mr. Lanton, the baker who always brought sweet buns to her father as payment for repairs. He looked at her with a strange softness.

“We haven’t heard the chimes in two mornings,” he said quietly. “We thought maybe... the town had stopped.”

She tilted her head. “Time doesn’t stop,” she said gently. “It just listens. And sometimes... it waits for someone to speak first.”

Behind her, the great bell in the tower, the one that hadn’t rung in decades, let out a slow, sonorous bong.

The people stilled.

Again: bong.

Twelve times it rang. Midnight. Though none of the clocks had told it so.

It rang because she had returned.

And with each peal, something in the town shifted. Subtly. Ivy peeled from stone. Windowpanes cleared of dust. A stopped pocket watch in the hands of a young boy began to tick again.

By morning, the entire town buzzed—not with haste, but with possibility.

She returned to the shop, the scent of brass and wood welcoming her like an old lullaby. She didn’t touch the clocks. Not yet. Instead, she opened the windows. Let the sun flood the rooms where shadows had long sat still.

She placed her father’s journal in the window, where the light could read it too.

Over the next days, people came not for repairs, but for stories. They brought broken watches and broken hearts, unsure which needed fixing. She listened to both.

And something marvelous began to happen.

The clocks she touched didn’t just tick—they remembered. A woman’s heirloom watch began to hum her grandmother’s lullaby. A sundial repaired in the square cast shadows that pointed not to the hour, but to the direction of one’s truest path.

Time in the town became... gentle.

People no longer rushed. They listened. They lingered. They held one another longer in their goodbyes. Children played longer in the streets. And when they passed her by, they greeted her not as the clockmaker’s girl—

—but as the Timekeeper.

And though her father was gone, she often felt his presence in the corners of the shop. In the hush before a chime. In the way the gears sometimes clicked to a rhythm only she could hear.

One evening, long after the shop had closed, she found a small note wedged beneath the windowsill. It was old, its ink faded.

“When you step outside, you’ll find me in the light between moments.”

—P.

She smiled.

Then, barefoot once more, she stepped out into the sunshine—

not as a girl behind glass,

but as a keeper of wonder.