The Counter-Clock

Arthur found it tucked away in the back of an antique stall, amidst tarnished silver and chipped porcelain dolls with dead eyes. Not an antique, really, more a curio. A squat, heavy thing, brass-plated with a face of cracked enamel, the Roman numerals faded and smudged. The hands were slender, almost delicate, a stark contrast to the clock's bulk. He picked it up. It felt cold, significant. Twenty dollars, the old man grunted, barely looking up from his sudoku. Arthur paid, shoved it into a canvas bag, and forgot about it until he got home.

His wife, Sarah, was out with her book club, so the house was quiet, save for the distant hum of the fridge. He unwrapped the clock on the kitchen counter, dusting off a film of grime with his thumb. The mechanism was surprisingly simple at the back, just a small battery compartment. He popped in a fresh AA. The hands jumped, then began their work. He watched, puzzled, as the minute hand lurched from the twelve, not to the one, but to the eleven. The hour hand followed, a slow, deliberate march against the usual flow. It was running backward.

He poked at it, tapped the glass. Maybe it was broken. Maybe some drunk clockmaker, half-blind, had assembled the gears the wrong way 'round. He wound it forward manually, setting it to the correct time, 7 PM. But as soon as he let go, it resumed its reverse crawl. Seven o'clock, then 6:59, then 6:58. He watched it for ten minutes, a morbid fascination growing in his gut. A backward clock. What a goddamn stupid thing. He almost put it back in the bag, maybe return it tomorrow. But something held him. He set it on his bedside table that night, ignoring Sarah's raised eyebrow when she came to bed. "What's with the museum piece?" she'd asked, flicking a glance at the dial, then dismissing it, turning over.

The first few mornings were a subtle torment. Instead of the reassuring tick forward, a gentle nudge into a new day, the counter-clock offered a relentless retreat. Six AM wasn't the beginning of a new hour; it was the slow consumption of the one before. Five fifty-nine, five fifty-eight. He'd wake with a jolt, not to an alarm, but to the thought that the last hour of peaceful sleep was now gone, unmade, irreversible. He'd lie there, staring at the ceiling, feeling the minutes drain away, the night un-happening, time sucking itself back into some cosmic vacuum. It was a strange, unsettling feeling. Most mornings, he hit snooze three times. Now, he was up before the first imagined chime of whatever hour the clock was pulling away from.

He started to look at things differently. A cup of coffee wasn't just coffee; it was a fleeting moment of warmth before it cooled, before the day un-brewed itself. A conversation with Sarah wasn't just words exchanged; it was time spent, time that would soon be un-spent. "You're… present," she said one evening, looking at him over the rim of her wine glass. He'd been listening to her talk about her horrible boss, really listening, not half-listening while scrolling through his phone. "What's gotten into you?" He just shrugged. How could he explain the invisible claw of a backward clock, pulling the rug from under every passing moment?

For years, he’d been meaning to fix the leaky faucet in the downstairs bathroom. "Later," he'd always told himself. "Got plenty of time." But "later" felt like a lie now. "Later" meant the drip would have un-dripped a thousand times, and the hour he spent on the couch instead would be a lost eternity. So, one Saturday, instead of binge-watching some procedural, he got out the wrench. His hands were clumsy, the pipe resistant, but he got it done. The quiet satisfaction wasn't just from the absence of the drip; it was from seizing a moment before it could be un-seized.

His son, Leo, was eight, all gangly limbs and boundless energy. Arthur often found himself waving Leo off, telling him he was busy, promising to play "later." But the counter-clock had sunk its teeth into him. One afternoon, Leo was trying to build a spaceship out of old cardboard boxes, struggling with the tape. Arthur was about to retreat to his office, the usual escape. But then he glanced at the clock on his wrist – his regular one, still ticking forward – and then, in his mind, he pictured the one on his nightstand, winding back. The image of those minutes, those irreplaceable moments with Leo, simply evaporating, becoming undone, felt like a punch to the gut.

He dropped his phone on the table. "Need a co-pilot?" he asked, walking over to the cardboard mess. Leo's eyes widened. They spent two hours, cutting and taping, laughing as the cardboard panels collapsed, rebuilding, arguing over the placement of the "thrusters." Arthur got glue on his shirt, a smudge of marker on his cheek. For those two hours, the idea of time receding wasn't a dread, but a motivator. He wasn’t just building a spaceship; he was building a memory that couldn’t be un-built, snatching a piece of now before the clock devoured it.

The counter-clock didn’t offer peace. It offered urgency. It was a constant, ticking reminder that every second you owned was a second already on its way out. You couldn't get it back. You couldn't replay it. It just… went. Un-happened. And if you weren't careful, if you kept waiting for a perfect "later," you'd find yourself with nothing but the ghosts of moments you'd let slip away, un-lived. He stood in the kitchen that night, the house quiet once more, a faint, lingering smell of cardboard and glue. He looked at the counter-clock on the wall, its hands creeping backward through the evening. Not a broken thing, he realized. A truth-teller. He picked up his phone, scrolled to his brother's number. He hadn't spoken to Mark in nearly a year. "Hey," he began, the word feeling a little rough, unused. "It's Arthur."