Horace

I don’t remember exactly where I got the watch, which bothers me more than it should.

There are two possible stories I tell myself. The first is that it was a gift from my Uncle Linus, who once showed up for Thanksgiving dressed as Rasputin and handed me a velvet box containing a gold wristwatch and a lemon. No note. No explanation. The lemon had a single word scratched into its rind: BEWARE.

The second version is that I bought it at a thrift shop that doesn’t exist anymore, on a street that I now can’t find on any map. The man behind the counter sold it to me for three dollars, but I clearly remember him saying, “You’ll pay the rest later,” and then laughing like a teakettle trying to scream.

Either way, I ended up with the watch.

It wasn’t flashy. Brass casing, black leather band, old-fashioned analog face. But it had… presence. The kind of object that seems to observe you when you’re not looking. It didn’t tick, not in the usual sense. It… hummed. Faintly. Like it was thinking.

Naturally, I named it Horace. It felt like a Horace. Stubborn, possibly retired military, fond of sherry and secrets. The name just came to me, the way names do when they’re not actually coming from you.

For a while, Horace behaved. He told time. He sat on my wrist. Occasionally, when I wasn’t paying attention, the minute hand would twitch. Just once. Like a flinch.

Then he stopped.

It was 3:42 p.m. on an ordinary Tuesday. I was in line at the DMV renewing a license I didn’t remember ever getting in the first place. When I glanced down, the second hand was frozen. Not dead—just... pausing, like it was thinking about something important. Like it had made a decision.

I tapped the glass. Nothing. I took it off and held it to my ear. The hum was louder now.

That’s when the odd things began.

First, it was time displacement. I'd blink and find I’d skipped an hour, or looped back into one. I watched the same episode of a cooking show four times in a row without realizing it—each time the chef made slightly different mistakes. Once he set the kitchen on fire. Once he cried. Once he simply stared into the camera and whispered, “He sees you.”

Then the people around me started acting strange.

My neighbor, Janet, knocked on my door at 3:42 every afternoon, just to hand me a piece of paper with a single word on it: Tick. One day it said Tock. I asked her why. She said, “Because he asked me to.” When I asked who he was, she looked horrified and ran off screaming in Latin, which she doesn’t speak.

At some point, I decided to open Horace.

Not a smart move.

The back of the watch didn’t come off normally. It peeled. Like old wallpaper. Inside, I didn’t find gears or springs. I found a note. Folded 37 times into a cube the size of a sugar cube. I unfolded it. It read:

“YOU'RE NOT WEARING THE WATCH. THE WATCH IS WEARING YOU.”

Signed,

Future You (sorry about the teeth thing)

I stopped sleeping after that. Not on purpose. Just… couldn’t find the time. Literally. My phone lost the clock app. My microwave blinked “: :” constantly. Even strangers started refusing to tell me the time, saying things like, “I don’t think you should know.”

Horace, of course, remained at 3:42. Proud. Silent. Watching.

I tried getting rid of him.

Buried him under a willow tree. Dug him up the next morning—he was back on my wrist. Threw him in the ocean. Woke up coughing seawater with kelp on my feet and Horace ticking happily. Left him at a pawn shop in another city. The pawn shop vanished.

Eventually, I accepted him. We had long, one-sided conversations. I started writing down things he might be saying. He liked riddles and obscure history. He hated daylight saving time. Once he spelled out “MOIST” using fallen matchsticks. I still don’t know why.

Things are quieter now. Time doesn’t really happen for me anymore—it just leans in one direction or another. I still eat, but I’m never hungry. People age around me, but I stay the same. I think Horace has made me a kind of time ghost. It’s not so bad. I can sit in parks and listen to squirrels insult each other in Morse code.

Once in a while, I meet others. People with frozen clocks, stuck calendars, looping watches. We nod to each other, cautiously. Some are worse off—one man kept aging backward until he turned into a cough and disappeared.

Horace still says it’s 3:42. I’ve come to like that time. It’s a good, neutral time. The kind of time where things haven’t gone wrong yet, but probably will. The hinge of the afternoon.

If I ever meet the man who gave me the watch—if there was one—I’d thank him. And then I’d ask him how to get Horace to blink. Just once.

Because I’m fairly certain he’s still watching.