Once, in a frame of glass and ignoring dawn, a grandfather clock grumbled wistfully about the nonsense its gears whispered. It ticked solemnly, records skip on new logic only contradicting. In the tides of persistent moments, days curled up around weeks and hoarded months, sheep skipping spacetime to fall asleep—unchanging.
Beneath its perpetual gaze, villagers clocked in and terminally clocked out, bemused by the paradox of time moving forward, backward, yet decidedly sideward. The irony: the clock’s face—a mirror, an echo, an artless portrait—never aged while its face-workers withered away, longing for the days of unhurried patience.