The Home for Wayward Clocks Read Free

freedom. How could you recognize what you’d never known? It’s like trying to find a word in the dictionary when you don’t know how to spell it.
    By the end of that first day of school, you know you are very, very different. And everyone else, the teacher, the children, seem to recognize that too, and they step carefully around you, and nobody asks you to play. You sit alone and you hold your clock and you watch the world go by. A world that seems more wonderful and vibrant by the minute. Yet you just don’t know how to join in. And nobody seems to know how to show you.
    Imagine.
    James didn’t have to imagine. He knew. At five years old, what was unimaginable to everyone else was commonplace to James. As common as making a peanut butter sandwich or flipping a pillow to the cool side in the middle of the night. And while James lived every day with the unimaginable, with root cellars and collars and tethers and belts, his own imagination began to stretch to impossible contortions. As he sat with his back to a world he longed to be in, he looked into a clock face and listened to the ticking with his whole heart. At home, down deep in the root cellar, he turned his face in the dark toward the alarm clock and the deep and sonorous tick told him stories and made him smile. He listened to the clocks and he believed they listened to him. He talked to them, telling them about his day, telling them about the strange world that he just didn’t understand, and they talked back and surrounded him with a worn and comfortable quilt of familiarity. At school, the toy clock’s tick was an invitation to play. At home, the alarm clock’s tock was his after school milk and cookies. To James, they were enough. Because he just didn’t know any better.
    Imagine.
    O n this day, a mid-morning in mid-September, sixty-eight years after that first day of kindergarten, James knew immediately that he’d made a mistake. He always told himself to never turn his back, to never turn away from the security monitor when outsiders were in his house, but he did anyway, and as soon as he did, it proved fatal. There was a pile of keys that needed to be sorted by clock type and as he reached for them, just for a second, for barely a breath, a crash echoed throughout the house. He didn’t even have to look back at the monitor to see where it came from; he knew. As soon as the sound reached his ears, it slid straight down to his heart and he heard that clock calling. Crying for rescue.
    James flew from his chair and down the hallway, up the stairs to the third floor, to the middle room on the right. The last place where he saw the tourists, a gray-haired man holding hands with his soft-spoken wife, both of them followed by their sullen teenage son. When James saw that boy, hunched behind his parents as they paid the admission, James knew he was trouble. Hair down to his shoulders, pockmarked face, jeans black and big enough to stuff dozens of clocks down the legs. James wondered if there was any way he could convince the husband and wife to leave the boy outside, that he’d be happier playing his Gameboy or GameCube or GameThis or GameThat, whatever it was that he held clenched in his dirty hands. Could James do that and still seem hospitable, still welcome this couple into his home and museum, the Home for Wayward Clocks? Still pay their admission and help him to support himself, support his clocks, support the whole town? The only way to keep those clocks ticking was money and the only way to make money was to keep those clocks ticking. In the end, James chose polite silence and watched this family walk to the first room, the living room, and then he hurried to the control center to study them on the security camera. He felt all the clocks stiffen in every room, on every floor. They sensed danger as well.
    Closing his eyes, James silently apologized to the clocks and he promised to keep up a stern vigil. But when those keys were just out of his reach,