Grandfather Clock

Grandfather clock

I fell asleep as an old man and woke up a grandfather clock. My pain and aching bones were replaced with mechanical gears working in synchronicity. I gave life structure and stability. I spent my days watching my master read the paper, his pipe billowed smoke into his stern face. My ticking hands dictated his mortality; I watched his family slowly age. He grew vague and thin; the color escaped his waning face. I watch as lives disintegrate to the beat of my drum; I have become father time. His daughter's innocence clung to the hallways and echoed through time long after they had gone. I watched as their laughter turned bitter. Wisdom did not reign in this house; only innocence and bitterness; and even that doesn't last. Nothing lasts, nothing ever lasts. Eventually the house crumbled around me and I gained nothing from watching their lives burn. Time continues regardless of the destruction it creates/observes. My hands began to rust and I waited to fade away. That however was not my fate; a young antiques dealer found me in the rubble of the house and brought me back from the dead. His face was fresh and young, he owns a vast collection of old books, various exotic statues and many many clocks. He cleaned off the dust and grime that had collected over years of neglect and restored my inner workings; making me feel like new. I watch as he tinkers with various pet projects and restores them to their proper order. He is my opposite; he keeps death away from things while my hands are reminders of the finite time one has. One cannot believe in immortality surrounded by clocks slowly counting down the seconds of life. I watched my new master grow grey and he caught up to the objects that surrounded him. He drank and stumbled in the dark; his heart broken from loneliness, his wife whom he loved very much had left him due to his obsession with his “trinkets'' as she called them. With every tick of the clock time is being swallowed up and I have no choice but to accept my nature. The once once young man died old and of a broken heart and I was carted away to a museum for the public to appreciate my antiquity. Schools of students pressed their grimy fingers against my glass enclosure with an air of disinterest. Eternity came to take me away and I did not go kicking and screaming; the last few rotations of my hands felt longer than my existence as a clock. The faces of the lives I enveloped came back to me as I reflected on my life as their destroyer. Their broken lives could not escape time or death, I was the mechanical means to both these inescapable ideas. I went to sleep as a grandfather clock and woke up an old man. 


The story is finished I just needed a few more words to get over the 500 word count…hope you like it!