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.

The silence wasn’t just in her apartment—it was everywhere. Outside, the birds hung mid-air like photographs, their wings frozen in mid-flap. A newspaper boy stood at the end of the street, his bike tilted forward, eyes wide open, lips mid-whistle. Even the clouds above her head refused to move.

Time had stopped.

Elina didn’t scream. Maybe because a part of her had been waiting for something like this. Maybe because the world had been spinning too fast for her lately, and deep down, she'd always wanted it to just… pause.

She walked. Her bare feet padded against the pavement as she wandered past frozen cars and people mid-stride. Her town looked like a painting—everyone caught in their own private moment. A woman holding a coffee cup, a man pulling a child across the street, a teenager smiling at a message that would never be sent.

It was beautiful. And terrifying.

She ended up at the town’s old train station. The iron gates were rusted, the clocks above them stuck at 3:17 like everything else. She stepped inside the waiting area and found someone else.

An old man. Sitting on a bench. Awake.

His eyes met hers. He looked like he had been waiting a long, long time.

“You too?” he asked softly.

Elina nodded.

The man patted the wooden bench beside him. She sat down.

“Name’s Thomas,” he said.

“Elina.”

He looked out at the empty tracks. “Time’s a strange thing. We chase it, we waste it, we beg it to slow down, and then one day, it listens.”

Elina looked at her hands. “Why us? Why are we the only ones moving?”

Thomas smiled, almost sadly. “Maybe because we were the only ones not running.”

That answer didn’t make much sense to her, but she didn’t question it. The world had already rewritten all the rules she thought she knew.

They talked. For hours, maybe days—though there were no clocks to tell. She told him about the life she had paused—about the job that drained her, the friendships that had turned into message threads, and the grief of losing her mother last winter, which never seemed to end.

Thomas shared stories of war, of love lost and found again, of watching his grandchildren grow up through screens. He’d been a clockmaker once, back when time had meaning. “People don’t want clocks anymore,” he said. “They want countdowns. Deadlines. Notifications. But time… real time… is quieter than that.”

Elina listened.

The world outside remained still, but something inside her began to shift.

They took long walks. They sat by the silent lake. She read old books in the town library, their pages no longer racing toward endings. Thomas taught her how to repair a pocket watch. She laughed for the first time in months.

One morning, or what felt like morning, they stood at the train station once more.

“Elina,” he said, placing a warm hand on her shoulder, “maybe it’s time for time to move again.”

She felt it before she heard it.

Tick.

It came from deep inside her pocket—the watch they had fixed together. Then another tick. And another.

Outside the station, the clouds began to drift. A wind stirred. A pigeon flapped its wings and took off.

The clocks were waking up.

“Wait—what’s happening?” she asked.

“You remembered what mattered,” he whispered. “That was all time was waiting for.”

Before she could say more, the station shimmered. Thomas blurred, like paint on water.

And then she was back. In her apartment.

3:18 AM.

Her phone buzzed. The world was moving again.

But something had changed.

Elina didn’t rush. She sat quietly, breathing in the now. The tick of the wall clock was soft, almost soothing. She walked over, took it down, and smiled. Then she reached into her coat pocket.

The pocket watch was still there. Still ticking.