Minutes Made of Flesh

At the center of town stood the clocktower, always ten minutes slow. No one remembered who built it. The brass gears clicked, the pendulum swung, and the hands moved like tired soldiers dragging their boots through mud. Children grew up marking time by it. Shops opened late, school started late, lovers met ten minutes later than they meant to. The town lived on borrowed minutes.

What no one knew was that behind the tower’s thick stone face, in a chamber sealed shut for centuries, lived a boy. Or something that still looked like one. He had been left there by the original clockmaker, given bread and water that never spoiled, taught the art of winding and oiling and balancing the weights. His task- keep the machine running.

He had never seen the sun, only the dim glow of oil lamps and the ticking metal forest around him. He knew the townsfolk only by their footfalls echoing through the tower and by the voices that carried in on festival days. He believed himself forgotten, but he also believed his work was holy. Each click of the gear was a prayer, each chime of the bell a confession.

One night, as a storm split the sky, the clock struck thirteen. No one outside knew why. The boy had slipped, his hand shaking, a drop of blood oiling the wrong gear. For the first time, the clock betrayed its secret.

The town stirred uneasily. Lovers missed their meetings. Workers arrived early and found empty streets. And in the cracks of the tower door, candlelight leaked out where there had never been light before. Someone was inside.

The morning after the clock struck thirteen, the town square was hushed. People gathered under the tower as if it were a crime scene. Children whispered about ghosts. Shopkeepers glared at their watches. The mayor tapped his cane against the cobblestones, trying to hush the unease with authority he didn’t really have.

Inside the tower, the boy — thin, pale, with hands browned by brass dust — sat against the wall, clutching his bleeding finger. He had never made such a mistake. He thought perhaps the clock itself had punished him. But then he heard it- voices. Not the muffled, accidental spill of words through stone. Real voices, close, right outside the door at the bottom of the spiral stair.

He froze. His entire life had been spent avoiding detection. The rule of his existence was simple- keep the clock, stay unseen. Yet the crack of light from the doorframe seemed to beckon him. For the first time, curiosity leaned heavier than duty.

That night, when the town slept uneasily, the boy opened the door. It moaned on ancient hinges, and cold air kissed his face like a slap. He stumbled into the square barefoot, blinking at the moonlight. The world was massive — buildings looming, stars crowding the sky, smells of damp stone and bakeries lingering. He wept at the sheer size of it.

A girl saw him. She was the baker’s daughter, sneaking out to chase stray cats. She froze at the sight of him. He looked like something half-made- too thin, too pale, hair ragged as straw. For a moment, they just stared at each other. Then she whispered, “You’re the ghost.”

“I’m not,” he rasped. His voice cracked from disuse. “I keep the clock.”

The girl didn’t scream. She didn’t run. Instead, she asked, “What’s your name?”

He hesitated. He had never been given one.

As days passed, rumors spread. People swore they saw someone slipping out of the tower at night. Some said demon, others said saint. The boy began to meet the girl in secret. She smuggled him food that wasn’t stale bread, taught him words for things he’d only heard as echoes. Window. Street. Star. She laughed when he called the moon a silver gear in the sky.

But the town grew restless. The clock struck wrong again — a missed chime, then a double one. Without its precision, shopkeepers argued, trains stalled, lovers quarreled, debts went unpaid. The mayor declared that something was wrong inside the tower, and a crew of men with tools and lanterns would break it open.

The boy knew if they found him, his hidden life would end. Worse — he feared the clock would stop altogether without his care. His existence, the rhythm of the town, his friendship with the girl — all balanced on the edge of discovery.

And then, the night before the men came, the clock seized. Its great gears froze mid-turn, and the bell was silent for the first time in centuries. In the ringing absence, the boy faced a choice- reveal himself to save the machine, or let the town wake to a silence they could never unhear.

He went to the girl. His voice shook when he told her- the clock did not merely keep time, it fed on it. Each swing of the pendulum drained him, binding his life to its rhythm. That was why he had never aged, never starved. The machine consumed his years and offered them back as minutes for the town.

The girl begged him to leave it, to come away, but he shook his head. If he abandoned the gears, time itself would rot. She touched his hand, felt the tremor of metal under his skin. He was becoming part of it.

When the men broke open the tower at dawn, they found the mechanism alive again, gleaming and relentless. But the boy was gone. In his place, in the very heart of the clock, a new gear turned — one slick with blood, steady as a heartbeat.

From then on, the tower kept perfect time. Yet some nights, when the bell struck, it sounded less like metal and more like a child’s cry. The townsfolk learned to live with it. They stopped asking questions. The mayor called it superstition, the priests called it penance, the shopkeepers called it irrelevant. But the baker’s daughter never walked past the tower again without looking up, searching for a face in the shadows of the gears.

And in hushed tones, only in winter when the streets were empty, people still whispered of the ghost-boy in the tower — whether he was saint or sacrifice, no one could agree. But everyone listened differently to the chime of the hour, as if it measured not just time, but the cost of it.