When the Clocks Forgot to Tick
No one noticed when the clocks stopped.
It was a quiet Tuesday morning, gray and unremarkable, when the tick-tick-tick that always lived in the background of Elina's small apartment simply vanished. At first, she thought the batteries in her old wall clock had died, but when she picked up her phone, it too had frozen—3:17 AM, eternally. No alarms, no notifications, no buzzing news updates.
