Kelloseppä

Time was a thing Toivo Virtanen understood—not as young men did, as an endless river of possibility rushing forward, but as an old man does—something slipping through the cracks in his arthritic fingers, slow and relentless.

Toivo had spent his life in the business of ticking things. Pocket watches with engraved initials of past lovers and old grandfather clocks with bellies full of brass gears meant to outlast the men who bought them. He had mended timepieces thousands of times over, replacing their batteries, cleaning water damage, and repairing broken parts. And yet, for all his skill, he had never found a way to fix time where it mattered.

Not when his son, Michael, was eleven and dashed into the street, full of laughter, full of running, full of life, and was struck down by a car that did not stop. Not when Eleanor, his wife—the only woman he had ever loved—passed last year, her heart giving out in the middle of an unfinished sentence.

After that, the clocks became his company. They didn’t care that he had spent the greater part of his life in this tiny clock shop in Philadelphia, still speaking broken English, his Finnish accent thick after all these years. Their steady, metronomic voices filled his little shop. Tick, tick, tick. A choir of reminders that, in any language, time went on, whether he wanted it to or not.

Then, one winter afternoon, as pale light pooled in the dusty shop windows, as Toivo fumbled with an antique pocket watch—his fingers no longer precise, his sight no longer sharp—something happened. The gears jammed. His hands failed him. Frustration, old and hot, boiled up. He struck the workbench.

And the world stopped.

The clock froze mid-tick. The air went still. The dust, which had been swirling in golden shafts of light, hung motionless, a thousand specks trapped in amber. Outside, a sparrow was caught mid-flight, wings upraised, its eyes unblinking.

Days passed. Toivo saw his ability to manipulate time now as a cruel joke played by a universe that was laughing at him. A universe that allowed him to move to another country to start a family, only for that family to die, leaving him alone in a strange place.

For days, he played with it. Stopped it. Rewound it. Paused a drop of water as it fell from the faucet, catching it just before it splashed against the sink. He stepped outside and made the world hold its breath. Stared into the vacant eyes in frozen faces of people walking their dogs or making their daily commute. He rewound the street, watching the cars slide backward, unspilling their exhaust into the sky. He stopped the sun briefly before considering the repercussions.

But he could not go back far enough. He could not reach Michael. He could not let Eleanor finish her final sentence.

He was a watchmaker. A mender of moments. But his own life was unfixable.

Then, one day, there was a girl.

Her pink backpack lay spilled on the sidewalk in a puddle of water slicked with oil and dirt. A book—spine cracked, pages curled, wet from rain—hung in the air, mid-fall. A large man behind her, mouth twisted, breath thick with tobacco and rot, arm outstretched. Thick fingers with hairy knuckles clamped around her waist. His other filthy hand covered her mouth, attempting to muffle an inevitable scream. Her beautiful, big eyes, outlined with rows of black doll-like lashes, stretched wide with fear.

Toivo stood. His back ached with the years he had wasted.

A long moment passed. He had spent decades watching time move, watching it steal, but this—this moment—was his to take.

He paused time once again. Crossed the street in slow, labored strides, passing through the frozen world like a ghost. The heels of his dress shoes echoed as he made his way down the usually bustling street. He reached the girl, bent down, touched her shoulder lightly, as if she were made of glass.

And then, with a breath, he rewound her.

The air rippled. The books lifted from the air, dried and tucked themselves back into her arms. The terror drained from her face as her muscles loosened, her breath unheld. The street blurred and bent like melting wax—

—and then she was gone.

Toivo didn’t move her. He rewound her. Taking her back to the moment before she had stepped onto that street. Before her feet had touched the pavement, before the danger had lurked terrifyingly behind her.

Somewhere, blocks away, the girl stumbled backward onto the cold steps of her apartment building. Her books, still in her arms. Her backpack, dry. Her breath rushed out in ragged bursts. She pressed a hand to her chest. Had she been crying? Had she been running? She couldn't remember. She only knew that one moment she had been there, and now she was here.

Inside, a voice called her name—her mother, asking if she’d finished her homework. The question rooted her back in reality, and whatever strange thought she’d had about leaving the house slipped away.

Back on the street, the man with the hairy knuckles and foul breath blinked, his grip suddenly empty. He looked down, confused, at the space where a girl had been. He turned his hands over, fingers curling around nothing. A second ago, he had been holding something warm, something alive. And now—

Nothing.

A cold, creeping sensation crawled up his spine.

Across the street, the little clock shop sat dark and silent, an old man sitting behind the counter, staring at the ticking hands of an antique pocket watch.

The world carried on.

For once, Toivo took time, instead of time taking him.

For the first time in a great while, he steadied the needle on one of his wife's favorite records. The speakers clicked on, and the thing made little crackling sounds.

A circa 1941 Horace Heidt began to sing alongside a big band, “I don't want to set the world on fire / I just want to set a flame in your heart.”

And for the first time in years, he remembered what his name meant.

Hope.