Lit Up | Fiction

The Slow Clock

Some houses keep more than one time.

K. V. THORNE

Photo via Unsplash

The hall clock ran eleven minutes slow and the kitchen clock ran nine minutes fast, and for the whole of our childhood you could tell which room our mother was calling from by how late she believed you to be. From the foot of the stairs you had four minutes you did not really have. From the kitchen doorway you had already missed the bus. We grew up fluent in the difference the way other children pick up a second language without noticing they have done it. Edie and I could stand in the hall and say it’s half six really and mean a particular shaved truth — the average of two rooms, a time that lived on no face in the house but only in the heads of the two girls doing the sum.

Our father offered, about once a year, to have a man come and put the clocks right. Our mother said the man could come when she was dead. She said it the way you decline a second helping, no weight on it at all, and the clocks stayed wrong, and she turned out to be exactly right about the order of those two events. The man never came.

The week we moved back in — each of us with a marriage finished behind us and startled to find the old coat of the house still fit — I reset them. Of course I did. I stood on a kitchen chair with the kitchen clock held in my two hands and wound it back the nine minutes, then went through to the hall to bring the slow one forward its eleven. For one evening — the only evening in the history of that house — both clocks said the same thing at the same time, and the same thing was the truth.

By morning they had drifted apart again. Not far. A minute, two. But moving, the way they had always moved, each keeping its own count of the day, and I stood between the two rooms in my nightdress and understood something about my mother I had been too young to understand while she was alive. She had not left the clocks wrong out of carelessness. She had stood on this same chair once, probably, with the key in her hand, and learned what I was learning — that you can bring two clocks to the same minute and they will not keep it. It would go on holding them whatever I did with a chair and a key. So I left them. I put the key back on the top of the hall clock where she had kept it and let the house go back to its two minds. Edie came down and saw my face and said, you reset the clocks, and I said I had, and she laughed at me, and that was the last either of us said about it for a long while.

We were not children. We were fifty-one and forty-nine, and the rest of this, said plainly, has a sound that makes us into girls. Edie was the younger. By two years and a fortnight she was the baby of the house, the one our mother kept back from things, the one I was told to mind. I minded her badly and loved her without trouble, which is the easy direction; the minding is the hard one. When her marriage went she came to me and when mine went I went to her and somewhere in the going back and forth we ended up in the one house, our mother three years under by then, her coats still on the hall pegs and the two clocks still keeping their argument going on the walls.

It was Edie who said the house made you pick a time. She said it as a joke, that first autumn, peeling potatoes at the fast clock while I laid the table under the slow one — you’ll have to pick, you know, you can’t keep standing in the hall doing the sum forever — and I did not pick, because I never pick, because given the choice between a thing and another thing I will keep both and let the situation decide. Edie picked. Or the kitchen picked her. She was always in it, the warm room, the room where the kettle was, and she came to the fast clock without ever once choosing it.

Those first months were good. I have to set that down plainly or the rest of it tilts. We were happy in that house, the two of us, happier than either marriage had managed. Edie cooked and got it wrong with great confidence and I did the accounts and got them right and bored her senseless reading them aloud. She hung a calendar in the kitchen and never once turned it past the month we moved in, because, she said, the kitchen clock was already running fast enough for the both of us and she would not be helping it. We watched bad television and she did all the voices. She taught herself the ukulele out of a library book, badly and on purpose, because she said a thing you can already do well stops being any fun, and she played me one terrible song a night until I clapped. She still laughed with her whole body, folding right over the table, a laugh too big for a woman her size — our mother’s laugh, the only thing of our mother’s I was glad to have back. Walking home a half step behind her I would think, with no occasion for it at all: there is nobody on this earth I would rather be a half step behind.

And then she began to go on ahead of me.

It was her hands first. Not hurt, not sick — only further along than mine, the skin at the knuckle gone loose, and two brown marks risen on the back of the right one in the exact place our mother had hers, that place I did not have a mark and still do not. I noticed them in October and said nothing. She was forty-nine. Her hands were our mother’s hands, and our mother had been seventy-four when she died, and one night when Edie had gone up I held my own hand against the window light and looked at the smooth back of it and felt something I had no business feeling: that it had got off the lighter of the two, and was glad, and had no right to be.

You will want to know how two women live in a small house and watch that begin and say nothing to each other about it. The answer is that it is the easiest thing in the world. You say everything else. You say there is no bread. You say the gutter wants clearing. You ask did she sleep, and she says like the dead, and you both let it go by, and clear it away with the cups. It is a great deal of talking, all of it arranged very carefully around a hole.

The clocks made a comedy of us, and we played it. She would call me down to a supper the kitchen clock swore was late and the hall clock swore was early, and I would come on the hall’s time and find she had eaten, and the next night we would do it again, neither of us giving the inch, because giving the inch meant saying out loud that one of us would have to come over onto the other’s time — and by then we both knew that traffic only ran one way.

By the turn of the year it was past her hands. It was the stairs, which she took one at a time now with a hand on the wall, telling me it was the cold in her knees, the same cold our mother used to blame, and we both let the cold take the blame, because the cold could be blamed and the other thing could not. She would stop at the turn of the stairs and look out the window at nothing, and I would hear the catch in her before she made herself go on. I never went up to her on those landings. I stood at the bottom in my slow time and let her have her privacy at it, and called that kindness, and went back to my list.

Because I had begun, that winter, to go on ahead too. Not in the body — my body kept its slow time and has kept it since — but in the only way I knew.

Here is what I actually did. While Edie slept the long mornings the fast clock seemed to grant her and steal from her in the same breath, I was up in the slow part of the house with the telephone and the door shut, low-voiced. I was finding out which of the town’s two undertakers would not be oily about it. I priced the thing. I took the good sheets out of the airing cupboard, the ones our mother had kept thirty years for a guest who never came, and washed and pressed and laid them on the bed in the spare room. I could not have told you ready for what. Except that I could have told you exactly, and I did not call it anything. I caught myself speaking of Edie, once, to the woman at the surgery, in a tense that had already let her go — she was always one for the warm room. I corrected it to is. My face went hot in the cold hall. I put the telephone down and stood there with my hand still on it.

The night it came apart was nothing of a night. Rain. The gutter I kept saying wanted clearing, still wanting it. The two of us in the kitchen at what the fast clock swore was nearly eleven, Edie at the table with her tea gone cold the way she let it go cold, me on my feet because I am always on my feet. And I said it — God forgive me, I said it lightly, I said it in the exact voice our mother used to decline the clock-man — I said, when the time comes I thought we’d just have the one car, you always hated a procession.

I heard it land.

Edie set her cup down. She did it carefully, which was worse than if she had thrown it. She looked at me with our mother’s two marks on the back of her hand and she said, when the time comes.

I said I only meant —

You’ve washed the sheets, she said. I’ve seen them in there. You’ve got me in the ground and the good plates back in the cupboard and yourself all squared away past the worst of it. She was breathing the way the fast clock made her breathe now, a half-step quick, getting the words out against it. You’ve been leaving for months, Joan. You do it so nicely I nearly thanked you for it. Up the stairs, on the phone, that face you put on. I know that face. You had it at Mam’s too — God, you had it at Mam’s — already at the funeral, just polite enough to wait for the body. She stopped. Don’t, she said. Whatever this is you do. Don’t do your leaving where I have to lie in the next room and listen to it. I’m not gone. I’m right here in the room, and you’ve walked out ahead of me and shut the door so soft I’m supposed to be grateful for the quiet.

I had an answer. I have an answer for everything. It came up in my mouth, the managing kind, it began we have to be sensible, it began somebody has to think about — and I opened my mouth on it, and the rain went on in the gutter, and nothing came out. The sensible thing stood up in me and found there was no floor under it. I shut my mouth. I sat down, which I never do. And across the table my sister’s hands were older than mine and her face was going on past mine in the fast light of the wrong clock, and she was forty-nine, and she was the baby of the house, and she was right.

I want to tell you I understood it all then, cleanly, but nothing about it came cleanly; it came the way the cold comes up off a stone floor through your feet before you have thought the word cold. My body knew first. My hands knew, flat on the table, that they had been saving themselves.

I do not know how long we sat. The fast clock said a time and the slow clock through the doorway said another, and the true time was the average we had done in our heads our whole lives, and for once I did not do the sum. I got up. Edie flinched — she thought I was off again, off up the stairs into my slow morning where the loss was already finished and filed — and I went past her into the hall, and I took the key down off the top of the slow clock where our mother had kept it and where I kept it, and I did not wind it.

I stopped it. I put my hand flat to the pendulum and held it, and felt the whole slow time of the house come up cold through my palm and stop, and the hall went quiet in a register I had never once heard it go quiet in. Fifty-one years in and out of that hall and I had never heard that clock not running. And then there was only the kitchen clock left in the whole house, the fast one, Edie’s.

I came back and I took up the key to the kitchen clock. I had never wound it. It was hers; she kept it going, I kept mine, that had been the arrangement of our whole lives in that house and neither of us had ever said it aloud. I reached up and I wound my sister’s clock to the top of its spring, so it would run on fast and hard, and I would keep its time now.

Edie watched me do it. She did not ask what I was doing because she could see what I was doing. She moved her cold cup aside to make room for my arms on the table.

Sit with me, then, she said. If you’re stopping in the room.

So I sat, and we let the fast clock have us. Somewhere past one it was already tomorrow in the kitchen while the hall held still behind us, and we were both in it now, the two of us, going on together.

She slept toward morning with her head down on her arms, her bad fast hands open on the wood, our mother’s two marks turned up to the light. I put my hand down on the table next to one of hers. Mine was the younger to look at now, and the one that would go on. It has gone on. The hall clock is still stopped; I never started it again; the house has kept the one fast time for ten years. I took the slow clock away from myself that night, and I would do it again tomorrow.

She woke once near the end of the dark. She felt the quiet, and she knew it.

You stopped the hall clock, she said.

I said I had.

Mam’ll have something to say. Present tense; our mother thirteen years under; the fast clock ticking the both of us on toward the day.

I said let her. I said I’m not winding it back.

And Edie smiled — not the brave thing she had kept on her face for me since October, but the real one underneath it — and went back down into her quick sleep.

Copyright © 2026 K. V. Thorne. All rights reserved.