The Unwinding Hour

The autumn of nineteen-nineteen clung to the town like a damp shroud, the sort of chill that settled deep in your bones and refused to budge. Thomas, or what was left of him, felt it most in the phantom ache of his missing left arm. He'd come back from the Somme with half a body and a head full of ghosts, and the world had the gall to keep spinning forward, oblivious. Every street corner, every familiar face, seemed to him a silent accusation. He’d try to work in his father’s old carpentry shop, the scent of fresh-cut pine a cruel reminder of normalcy, but his good hand would tremble, the saw refusing to find purchase. He spent most days just walking, the click of his heavy boots on the cobbled lane the only rhythm he trusted.

Today, though, his feet took him to Arthur Finch’s shop, a place he hadn’t dared enter since before the war. Old Arthur, the town’s clockmaker, had lost his own son, Samuel, at Passchendaele. Thomas remembered Samuel, a gangly lad with a grin too wide for his face, always tinkering with gears alongside his father. The shop window was grimy, the brass pendulum of the display clock dulled to a matte finish. Thomas pushed the door open. A bell jangled, a sound thin and reedy, like a ghost sighing.

The air inside was thick with the scent of brass polish, old wood, and something else, something like quiet despair. Clocks of every size lined the shelves, their ticks and tocks a chaotic chorus, a thousand tiny heartbeats pushing relentlessly forward. Arthur emerged from the back, a man whittled down to bone and grief. His smock, usually pristine, was smudged with oil, his spectacles perched low on his nose, magnifying eyes that held an unnerving, distant gleam. He barely acknowledged Thomas, just gestured with a skeletal hand towards the center of the room.

There it stood. A grandfather clock, tall and elegant, crafted from dark, polished mahogany, its face gleaming under the weak lamplight. It was beautiful, undeniably. But Thomas’s breath hitched in his throat. The hands… the minute hand, the hour hand, they weren't moving clockwise. They were sweeping back. Counter-clockwise. A slow, deliberate, impossible retreat. The second hand, a thin, gold needle, skipped and jumped, not forward, but *backwards*, minute by minute, hour by hour.

Thomas stared, dumbfounded. He felt a weird lurch in his gut, like falling from a great height. His good hand instinctively went to where his other arm should have been, a habit born of an absence he could never fill. “Arthur,” he croaked, his voice rougher than he’d intended. “What in God’s name…?”

Arthur’s lips barely moved. “My Samuel,” he whispered, his voice dry as autumn leaves. “He was always so fascinated by how things work. Wanted to know if you could make a clock go the other way. Before… before he left.” Arthur picked up a small jeweler’s loupe, holding it to his eye, but he wasn’t looking at the clock. He was looking through it, at something only he could see. “He asked me, Thomas. A week before he went to the front. Said, ‘Father, if you could, wouldn’t you just rewind it all?’”

A shiver ran through Thomas, not from the cold. He remembered that feeling, that desperate, animal urge to undo, to unsee. He saw his brother, young Billy, in his mind’s eye, waving from the train carriage, a cheerful, ignorant wave. Thomas saw the telegram, the stiff, formal words that had shattered his mother. He saw the craters, the mud, the boy he’d tried to pull from the wire, the boy whose eyes had gone empty even as Thomas pulled. Could you really rewind all that? The thought was a sickening, sweet poison.

The clock, Arthur’s monstrous creation, became a quiet, morbid curiosity in town. Women, their faces etched with lines of grief, would sometimes stop by the window, watching the hands retreat. A few, desperate, would even come inside, their fingers hovering over the glass, as if a touch might make the past real again, solid, tangible. Arthur never charged them, never spoke much. Just watched them watch the clock. It was a mirror, Thomas realized, reflecting every raw, unhealed wound in their hearts.

One afternoon, Thomas found himself alone in the shop with Arthur. The old man was hunched over his bench, polishing a gear, his movements slow, meticulous. “It doesn’t work, you know,” Thomas said, his voice flat. He wasn’t accusing, just stating a fact. “It don’t bring ’em back.”

Arthur didn’t look up. “Never said it would, Thomas.” A long pause. The counter-clockwise tick-tock was loud in the silence. “Some things, they just ain’t meant to go forward no more. Not for some of us, anyway.” He finally lifted his gaze, his eyes ancient and knowing. “You can’t change what happened. But you can remember what you had, can’t you? And sometimes… sometimes it’s easier to just watch it go the other way, even if it’s only pretend.”

Thomas stood there for a long time, watching the minute hand creep back towards yesterday. He thought of Billy, not as a casualty, but as the grinning boy, running through fields of summer clover, before the world exploded. The clock didn’t change anything, no. But it acknowledged the hurt. It acknowledged the impossible wish. He looked down at his empty sleeve, then back at the clock’s unwavering, backward sweep. It was a lie, perhaps, but an honest one. And for some, that was all they had left.