The Clock Eats Weekends

How it begins

Lydia March repaired the factory clock and lost her Saturday. At first she assumed she had slept through it. This would have been disappointing but not unprecedented.

Then the whole town arrived at work on Monday carrying unopened picnic baskets.

The clock had been silent for thirty years. Its restoration contract promised improved productivity and civic pride, two phrases Lydia had learned to charge for separately. She had cleaned the escapement, replaced three teeth and polished the brass plaque beneath the pendulum. TIME WELL SPENT.

Now the pendulum ticked with a sound like someone chewing very carefully.

Omar Finch stood in the square holding a tomato plant. He had intended to put it in the community garden yesterday. The pot still wore the paper label Lydia remembered seeing on Friday.

'I thought weekends were personal,' he said.

'They usually are.'

'It seems someone has purchased this one.'

At the factory gate, workers watched the new performance figures rise. Management announced a remarkable voluntary effort. Nobody remembered volunteering. A child asked why her birthday cake was still in the refrigerator. Her father checked his calendar and frowned as though the cake had made an administrative error.

Lydia climbed the clock tower. Behind the face, the restored wheel had grown a second ring of teeth. Between them lay a scrap of blue gingham. She recognized it from the picnic blanket folded on her kitchen chair.

Omar followed more slowly, carrying the plant.

'You should be working,' she said.

'I am. Just not for anyone who counts this sort of thing.'

Through the tower window, Lydia saw his garden: vegetables for neighbors, benches repaired with old timber, a path wide enough for the woman from number twelve.

The clock swallowed another inch of gingham.

Lydia set down her tools. For the first time in forty years of fixing timepieces, she wondered whether making one run accurately was the wrong job.