The Toleration Bell of Clatterby

Clatterby had the particular smell of salt and solder, the kind that settled in your hair if you lived long enough among brass gears and sea spray. Morning light slanted between the iron ribs of the old clockworks and painted the cobbles with the sort of gold that made shop signs look like polite little promises. Elliot Bramble walked past them with a broom under one arm and a habit — the half-habit of someone who fixed other people's small disasters for a living. He had three pockets full of odd things: a packet of mismatched buttons, an old metro token, and a stub of pencil with somebody's phone number he knew he'd never call.

He lived above a laundromat that hummed like a friendly monster and below Lina's Cupcakery, where Lina herself made experimental sprinkles and practiced shouting at pigeons in Italian. 'Morning, Bramble,' Lina called from her window, tossing him a paper bag with what might have been a raspberry scone or, Elliot guessed, the town's last remaining act of culinary heroism. Her eyes were alarmed in the way bakers' eyes got when an inspector loitered.

Elliot's job title was as vague as his tidy toolbelt: Civic Oddjobber. It meant he fixed the municipal kleenex dispensers, emptied empathy boxes, and replaced the occasional municipal wheel that had come loose. It also meant he was the one who wound the Toleration Bell every month, the bell that made the town forgive people's small eccentricities for an hour. The bell didn't give people permission to break laws, no. It gave them permission to try poems on the tram or to wear mismatched socks with pride. Without it, Clatterby felt like a mouth without a smile.

On that morning, the bell house looked like any other house of something important: neat, a little threadbare, and scented faintly of old paper. Mason, the clockmaker, sat on the low wall with a thermos and a screw driver that shone when he turned it toward the sun. 'You're on winding duty today, aren't you?' he asked. His voice was made of bell bronze and careful sentences.

Elliot nodded, feeling the small, steady ache of wanting more meaningful work — the ache you brought to the counter of your own life and left waiting for someone to take. He ran a hand through his hair and imagined, for a ridiculous moment, that the town would ring the bell and it would sound like an apology and a promise at once. 'Would be nice,' he said. He hugged the broom like a fellow conspirator and stepped toward the bell house, not knowing that the day would pull a trick on the town and on him.