Lullaby of Lost Time

In the farthest corner of his grandmother’s attic, Leo’s fingers brushed against something cold and smooth beneath a faded quilt — its threads worn thin from years of use, woven tight like the memories held within. He pulled back the fabric to reveal an old clock, its face clouded with dust, its wood carved with curling patterns like frozen vines. The attic was thick with dust and silence — the heavy scent of forgotten years wrapping around him like a shroud.

The clock leaned slightly to the left, as if trying to disappear into the cracked plaster. Its face was peculiar: no numbers, no ticking second hand. Instead, a single hand moved slowly, relentlessly — but backwards.

Leo’s breath hitched. The single hand moved slowly—backwards—gliding counterclockwise with a deliberate grace, like a slow dance undoing moments he’d lost.

He reached out with a tentative hand and touched the clock’s cool surface. It was warmer than he expected, almost pulsing softly beneath his fingers — like it remembered him.

His grandmother had died three days earlier, quietly, in her sleep. The small house where she had lived alone now belonged to him — a tangled nest of memories, heirlooms, and mysteries waiting to be unpacked. She had been the last tether to his parents, who vanished one autumn night when he was just five, swallowed by silence and unanswered questions.

His earliest memories were of her garden — the sweet scent of jasmine, the soft rustle of leaves — and her countless clocks. Clocks lined the walls, sat on shelves, ticked and chimed from every corner. She loved clocks. They were her friends, her keepers of time and stories.

But none had been like this.

That first night, Leo sat cross-legged on the attic floor, watching the hand move backward through the quiet dark. The rest of the house was still, except for the occasional creak or groan. Outside, the wind whispered secrets through the bare branches, threading through the cracks in the window like fragile spider silk.

He drifted into a strange, weighted sleep.

In his dream, he was six again. He held a threadbare stuffed bear tight to his chest, standing in the hallway outside his old bedroom. The walls were painted a soft blue, and a faint scent of vanilla filled the air.

His mother’s voice sang from the kitchen — a lullaby woven with light and shadow, its melody a thread that tied him to a moment now almost lost.

He felt the warmth of the song wash over him like sunlight through a window. It was so real he could almost reach out to touch it.

The next morning, he woke with a start, the lullaby still humming faintly in his ears. The clock’s hand had moved backward several minutes while he slept.

He wound the clock carefully, feeling a strange comfort in the gentle resistance of the mechanism. The hand sped up, ticking backwards faster, as if the clock itself responded to his grief — bending time to his will.

Days passed, and Leo found himself drawn to the attic each evening. He began to notice something strange: fragments of memories surfacing like bubbles beneath the surface of his mind — delicate threads of the past weaving themselves through the present.

A flash of laughter. The rough texture of his father’s coat. The smell of his mother’s scarf, redolent of cinnamon and rose petals. But it was more than just memory. It was sensation — the ache of a scraped knee, the softness of his mother’s hand on his forehead.

One night, eyelids heavy in the attic’s gloom, the air around Leo shimmered and softened. The dusty beams melted away, replaced by the warm golden glow of his childhood living room. Toys—once forgotten—lay scattered across the worn carpet. The sun streamed through the window, pooling in lazy patches of light. He was there—almost touchable, almost real.

Until one night he visited the evening before his parents vanished.

From the shadows, Leo watched his mother linger in the doorway, her voice a hushed thread weaving through the quiet room as she whispered to his father.

“He’s getting close,” she said, voice low and urgent.

“He’s just a boy,” his father replied, rubbing his tired eyes.

“You know what this house is. What it holds.”

Leo stepped forward, but they did not see him.

He tried to call out, but his voice was a ghost.

His mother suddenly turned, eyes wide.

And she saw him.

For a moment, her face softened with sorrow and wonder.

“Leo?” she whispered.

Then the moment dissolved like mist.

He woke with tears on his cheeks and a single name on his lips: Malak.

A name he didn’t know — yet somehow felt it belonged to the story he was uncovering.

Over the following weeks, Leo pieced together fragments — whispered conversations, hidden letters stitched together like fragile tapestry, the strange carvings on the clock itself. The house was older than it seemed. It remembered things. Things he was only beginning to understand.

The clock was not simply a measure of time. It was reversing it.

Undoing it.

And offering him choices — what memories to hold, what to release. What to confront.

One evening, the hand faltered and stopped—suspended between moments, trembling like a held breath.

Leo sat motionless, heart pounding in the heavy silence. The attic light flickered, shadows stretching and shrinking. Then, faint but unmistakable, his mother’s voice floated through the darkness—soft, clear, singing the lullaby he thought he’d lost forever.

He stood and reached out to touch the clock’s face.

The glass was warm beneath his fingertips.

Behind it, in the reflection, he saw himself as a child.

Beyond that, a hallway he hadn’t walked in decades.

A voice — both his grandmother’s and not — whispered:

“You can go. But you must leave something behind.”

Leo hesitated.

The clock began ticking again. Backwards.

He stepped forward.

And the attic was empty.

Now the clock sits on a shelf, quietly ticking backwards, counting down or counting up, to a time only it remembers.

Leo is gone, but the house is not silent.

Sometimes, late at night, the lullaby drifts from the attic.

And the clock hand sweeps back, marking a story unfinished — waiting for its next reader, its next traveler, its next chance to rewrite what was lost.