Between Seconds

On a rain-lacquered morning, Jonas tilted the loupe to his eye and bent over a pocket watch older than his city permit. The tick wasn't a tick at all, more a soft coin dropped into velvet. Behind the shop window, the street smeared into gray arcs, umbrellas tilting like beetles. In the back room, the kettle rattled once and went patient.

'Is it ready?' The man with the beaver collar lifted his chin in the doorway, peering past brass tools and velvet trays. Jonas nodded without looking up. He could feel when a wheel sat true; it showed in his shoulders as a small release, like a note settling into harmony.

'One more second,' Jonas said, and the word second snagged on the same invisible thread it always found, the small snag in his chest he had learned to live with. One-two, one-two-three, one-two, a skipped beat that made his breath move around it like a river around a stone.

He snapped the case shut and polished his prints from the steel. The man paid in exact bills, as people who love watches often do. Jonas wrapped it, folded the paper, wrote the surname by habit and crossed his own t in the old way his mother used to insist on. He didn't think of her; he never did on purpose. Memories arrived like birds that mistook his window for sky.

When the bell over the door stopped ringing, he took the kettle off and climbed the narrow stairs that smelled faintly of vinegar and old varnish. His father liked tea hotter than was reasonable. Otto sat at the table with the newspaper spread like a map, his left hand on the headline he could not mouth. His right hand touched the saucer twice, a ritual that announced he was ready. The stroke had pared his speech to a few nouns and the tenderness in his eyes.

Jonas set the cup down and waited for the two taps on his wrist. Otto tapped once, twice, then tapped a third time, as if trying to find time's missing step. His mouth gathered for a word that wouldn't form.

'It holds,' Jonas said softly, and slid the cup closer. Out the small window, the chestnut across the courtyard shook water from its leaves. A kite of children's laughter strained down the street and snapped back.

Nadja from the bakery knocked with a bag of rolls, the smell of cinnamon preceding her. She kissed Otto's crown, looked at Jonas in the way that included his whole day and the next. 'You hear the weather? Storm from the coast. They'll shut the trains if it keeps.'

Jonas said he had heard. He hadn't. He had been listening to the shop, to the minute hands and the way the rooms kept time better than he did.

Nadja left the bag and a note about the neighborhood meeting. Jonas slid the rolls into the bread tin with the dented lid. Above them the ceiling creaked, the old bones of joists shifting as the rain picked up. Otto lifted his eyes to the stain in the corner where a leak had once been, then pointed toward the hallway. His finger trembled. He was saying not yet, or be careful, or both.

'I won't go up,' Jonas said. He meant it for that moment. The attic hatch was a square of dust and dread. All his childhood it had been a mouth that never opened. The rules of the house had been simple then: don't run in the hall, always wind the living room clock before bed, never open the trunk with the red straps. He could still hear his mother's bracelets clinking in the kitchen, and the way she would say later, later, later, and then there was no later.

The kettle had given up its last heat. Jonas set his hands flat on the table's scarred wood and watched the steam gather on the window until nothing outside existed but the blurred yellow of the lamp across the courtyard. The skip inside his chest fell into step with the rain on the sill. One-two, one-two-three, one-two. He rubbed his thumb along the edge of the table until the skin warmed.

The shop bell rang again: a student with a hood and a watch that would not start, a woman looking for a new band to match a suit, a boy who wanted to hear the loudest tick. The day was a chain of small needs; he fitted himself between them. When the light thinned and the sign on the opposite shop clicked off, he locked the front door and turned the face of the wall clock to stop it from striking the hour.

In the hall, the attic hatch made its slight groan as the house cooled. Otto tapped his cup three times and looked toward the ceiling as if time might be listening.