The Clockwork Kid

In the crooked town of Gearford Hollow, where the rooftops leaned like old men whispering secrets and the fog rolled in as thick as soup, there lived a girl with a mind full of gears and sparks.

Her name was Juniper Thatch, though most people just called her “June.” At twelve years old, she had more ideas than friends, and that suited her just fine. Friends didn’t help you build a rocket-powered pogo stick or a breakfast-making hat that scrambled eggs on the go.

June lived in a creaky three-story house with her father, a sleepy-eyed librarian, and her parrot, Crank, who had a vocabulary full of warnings like “DANGER!” and “DUCK!”—all of which he used with little discretion.

But it was the attic where June truly lived. That was her lab, her sanctuary. It smelled like oil and orange peels, and the walls were lined with blueprints, gadgets, and occasionally smoking prototypes. She had built wonders up there: self-dancing shoes, an alarm clock that threw water at you, and a robotic arm that gave thumbs-up at inconvenient times.

Yet despite all her marvelous creations, June felt something was missing—something big.

Then, one rainy afternoon, while adjusting the spring tension on her hover-scooter prototype (which mostly just vibrated), she knocked over an old filing cabinet. Behind it was a narrow slit in the wall—just wide enough to reveal a hidden compartment.

Inside lay a scroll of faded blueprints, rolled tight and sealed with wax. The initials “M.T.” were pressed into the seal.

“Crank,” she whispered, eyes wide. “This was Gran Matilda’s.”

Her grandmother had vanished years ago, leaving behind nothing but a trail of newspaper clippings and a mystery. June had never known her well, only heard whispers of “the eccentric one” or “mad Matilda,” the woman who once tried to power a carousel with moonlight.

June unrolled the blueprint and gasped. The design was unlike anything she’d ever seen. At the top it read:

Temporal Elasticator v1.0

— A device for the brave, the brilliant, and the utterly bonkers.

“It bends time,” June murmured, tracing the lines with her fingers. “We could pause it… rewind it…”

Crank squawked. “Highly inadvisable!”

“Which means we’re definitely doing it.”

The next two weeks were a blur of soldering, sparks, and at least one mild electrocution (she wore the same puffy hairdo for days). She raided junkyards for old clock parts and traded half a box of banana bread for a quartz stabilizer from Old Man Griggs.

With Theo—her reluctant best friend and occasional test pilot—she assembled the Temporal Elasticator. It stood in the center of her attic like a metallic throne crossed with a grandfather clock. Brass tubes pulsed with light. A lever jutted out like it belonged in a steampunk locomotive.

“Ready?” she said, goggles sliding down her nose.

“No,” said Theo. “But you’ll do it anyway.”

She did.

The machine hummed to life. The attic walls shuddered. A high-pitched wheeeEEEEEeeee rang out—and time stopped. Or rather, everything slowed so much that the rain outside hovered midair, each droplet a frozen pearl.

“It worked,” June breathed.

She danced between raindrops, sketched new designs, and rewrote entire homework assignments in the span of a second.

But then—CRACK! The machine sparked. Time snapped back like an angry rubber band.

June and Theo tumbled to the floor. The Elasticator was smoking.

“It needs stabilization,” she coughed. “It’s too unstable for prolonged use.”

Theo groaned. “You think?”

Still, they had touched time—and that changed everything.

Over the following weeks, June improved the machine. She discovered that short bursts worked best—ten seconds here, three there. But the more she used it, the more strange things began happening.

Objects appeared where they shouldn’t be. Time loops. Duplicates of Crank shouting at each other. And once, she caught a glimpse of herself—older, wearing a long coat, disappearing through a door that wasn’t there a second before.

She wasn’t just tinkering with time. She was unzipping it.

Then came the night everything broke.

An accidental overload ripped open a pocket of collapsed time. Theo was nearly lost in the loop, reliving the same sneeze fifteen times until June managed to drag him out.

She shut down the machine. Locked it. Hid the key.

But that wasn’t the end. It was only the beginning.

In her attic, beneath the old rafters, June wrote in her notebook:

"The Elasticator is too dangerous. For now. But Gran didn’t vanish—she traveled. Somewhere in time. One day, I’ll finish what she started. I’ll find her. Until then… I build. I learn. I prepare."

The parrot squawked. “MADNESS!”

June grinned. “No, Crank. Adventure.”

MORAL:

Inventiveness is powerful, but it must be guided by

responsibility.