The Clocktower

Author's Note: In the midst of a busy weekend of painting and other moving responsibilities, I found a small hour to write this piece. It's not much, barely even grown once out of my mind except for a quick spell-check. It represents an exercise is story writing, as I am still unfamiliar and unpracticed in the art. Should anyone know of any other forms of literary exercise, I should be grateful to hear them

The chimes struck three in the afternoon. Off by seven thirteenths of a second. There are none in the city that know or care about such a discrepancy, save but one. But then again, it is the job of the Timekeeper to care about such things.

My name is Abelard, and I live in the clocktower. My duty is to make sure the chimes are always on time and to see that the mechanisms run at peak efficiency. Just as my father before me, and his father before him, I was trained in horology from a young age, brought up to carry the pledge of seeing that the city runs on time. I am not the last of the Timekeepers, though I fear I may be the next to last. My son, destined to continue the work I have done, is an idiot.

I do not use the phrase lightly. He truly is absent of any mind for common sense, let alone clockworking. His heart is in the right place, though it takes more than heart to see the logic of the gears and escapements. He's still constructing his mechanisms at an amateurish level, showing no signs of originality or imagination. To him, every clock is just a mystery. He cannot wrap his mind around the ticks and tocks and clangs of a regular pocketwatch, let alone a magnificent work like the clocktower in which we live. I had hoped that moving into the tower itself would have inspired him to work harder, but he continues to make the same mistakes over and over. His calculations are haphazard, the gears he makes are shoddy and unsymmetrical. Even the bell-works he's created sound terrible; he has no ear for chime music. I'm afraid the country will soon lose an art, even though it would break him so to have such a failing.

Poor Daniel. He was hopeless before he started. Did you know that he decided to make his very first clock out of pure gold? It was an ostentatious project, to be sure, but it warped far too easily. The mere weight of the pendulum caused the clock to lag and cease functioning altogether after only two days! He had wasted nearly two months salary, not to mention the a blatant disregard for wisdom of his father, creating such a disaster. But he always did have a way of dreaming large. That's why I had hoped that standing in the largest, most famous clock in all the world would goad him into a more practical dream. One grounded in the reality of clocks; one of math, of consistency and discipline. But so far it has not, and it appears I was misguided.

The clocktower's discrepancy was no doubt due to one of Daniel's oversights. He may have forgotten to clean the driving gear. Dust builds up in as little as an hour, and a collection of the stuff can cause too much friction on the gear teeth. I'm proud to say that the city has never had to replace a single component of the clocktower since it has come under my care, but I don't think that claim will last much longer. I am old, and I cannot move and hear as well as I used to. There once was a time when all I had to do was sit in the clocktower for a few moments and listen. She would tell me everything that was wrong with her: the clicks and whines meant an unpolished gear shaft, a moan could mean an overwound power cog. Every problem would be revealed in the myriad of music that the clock would make. It was partly designed that way; it would be impossible to find any one of the millions of things that could go wrong with the clocktower. But all the sounds do no good if they fall upon deaf ears.

I am dying. I have done my best to chronicle of knowledge of the clocktower and its methods in several volumes located in the study. They are sizable, but I trust that anyone who can read them and understand their contents should be able to effectively care for the clocktower until such a time when replacement timepiece is required. I've instructed Daniel to petition the city for a new Timekeeper, and have given him the keys to the tower itself. I can only hope that someone with a bit more wherewithal and natural inclination for the science of clocks will take up the mantle. In the meantime, I will sit and listen to the music of the clock and sit with my boy. These are all the things I have left in life, and while they couldn't be more different in caliber, I love both them dearly.