The Unwound Hour

Arthur sat slumped, half-buried in the armchair’s threadbare velvet, the stale air of his apartment thick around him. Dust motes danced in the weak sunlight slicing through a grime-streaked window. Days, weeks, months blurred into a single, suffocating gray. Phoenix Designs, his dream, his sweat, his very backbone, had crumbled to ash six months ago. The ghost of what he’d lost clung to every surface, a fine layer of grief and inaction. He just sat, breathing it in, letting it seep into his bones.

One particularly dead afternoon, a vague sense of something needing doing, anything at all, pulled him towards the back of his closet. Buried beneath old tax returns and a forgotten bowling ball, he found it: a heavy, dark wooden box, unassuming, with brass clasps tarnished green. He didn’t remember putting it there, didn’t remember owning anything like it. Inside, nestled in yellowed satin, was a mantel clock. Plain, dark wood, brass bezel, Roman numerals – nothing ornate, just an old, solid piece. He ran a thumb over its smooth, cool surface.

He lifted it out, a surprising weight in his hands. It looked like any other clock, but it felt… different. He found the winding key on the back, a small, intricate thing. With a sigh that tasted like dust, he wound it, half-expecting nothing. A low whirring started, then a series of hesitant clicks. The minute hand jumped, not forward, but backward. One minute, then two, then three, each tick a soft, defiant *tock*. His brow furrowed. He shook it gently. No change. He tried to force the hands forward. They resisted, then snapped back, resuming their slow, deliberate retreat into what had already been.

He set it on the mantel, a perverse, silent joke against himself. Its constant, quiet *tock-tick* became the new rhythm in his otherwise dead quiet home. It was a physical manifestation of his own endless loop of regret. Every backward tick: the day the bank called, the empty office, the look on Mark's face, his old partner, when Arthur had told him it was over, the last, bitter words from Sarah. Each minute unwound, carrying him further from the present, deeper into the past he couldn't change, couldn't fix.

He tried to ignore it. Shoved it in a cupboard. The muffled *tock-tick* still found him, seeping through the cheap wood. He covered it with a blanket. He swore he could still hear it, a phantom sensation of time draining away. He found himself snapping at the grocery store clerk for no reason, cursing at traffic that hadn't even begun to snarl. He couldn’t shake the feeling of time, of *his* time, being sucked backward, into nothingness. It wasn't just a clock; it was a leach on his soul, siphoning off every precious second.

One morning, he woke up feeling a profound, gut-wrenching sickness, not of body, but of spirit. The clock’s backward hum was loud, almost aggressive, in the silence. He stared at his reflection in the dark window – hollow eyes, an unshaven face he barely recognized. He saw the dust-covered drafting table, ignored for months, years even. He’d once spent entire nights there, lost in creation, breathing life into blueprints for spaces that would hum with purpose. *Phoenix Designs*. It wasn’t just a business, it had been his name, his vision, his blood.

The backward clock, meant to drag him deeper into the abyss of his past, suddenly did something else entirely. It sparked a bitter, desperate defiance. "Enough," he muttered, the words raspy in his throat. He couldn't fix the past, couldn't rewind it, no matter what the stupid clock showed. But he wasn't going to *unlive* the present either, let it drain away into the unchangeable then. He grabbed a rag, the coarse fabric biting into his palm. He started wiping dust from the drafting table, the motion clumsy at first, then gaining a quiet, determined rhythm.

He pulled out his old sketchbooks, their covers brittle. Ideas, half-formed, some terrible, some still holding a flicker of promise. His hand felt clumsy at first, unused to the weight of a pencil. He drew, lines hesitant, then bolder. Hours blurred. The clock ticked backward on the mantel, a constant, grating hum, but he didn’t look at it. He was looking at the blank page, at the future waiting to be filled. He made a phone call he’d put off for months, a tentative reach for a connection he’d burned. He put on his old running shoes, the soles worn thin, and hit the pavement, the grit in his teeth a familiar comfort.

He wasn't fixed. Not suddenly rich, not famous, not even happy in the way people talk about it. But he was *moving*. He finished a small design, just a concept for a park bench, nothing grand. It wasn't Phoenix Designs, not yet. But it was *his*. He stood at the window one evening, the city lights a blurred smear against the dark. The clock on the mantel, still unwinding time, was a distant hum. He didn’t look at it. He looked out, at the darkness, at the first hint of dawn on the horizon, feeling something he hadn’t in a long time. A slight, almost imperceptible pull, pushing him, inch by quiet inch, forward.