Tosia’s ordinary morning turns uncanny when the glass clock from her great-grandmother starts counting backwards and something inside it begins to knock.
Sunlight slipped through the curtains and laid pale gold bands across Tosia’s room. The tenement on the edge of the city was already awake, but in her corner of it morning still felt half-finished, as if the day had not decided whether to begin. Beneath a stack of cushions, wrapped in a faded scarf, lay the glass clock her great-grandmother had left her - round, weighty, and too strange to be beautiful in any ordinary way.
It had always ticked softly. Today it was racing.
Tosia sat up so fast the cushions slid to the floor. The hands were moving, but not where they should have been. They had edged past the hour and were drifting back, minute by minute, against the flow of time. She stared at the dial, unable to blink. Beside the window, Almond sprang onto the sill, tail stiff, yellow eyes fixed on the clock as if he had heard something she hadn’t.
From the kitchen came the familiar clatter of plates and the low murmur of the radio, where her mother was making breakfast. Toast crackled. A spoon tapped against a mug. Yet even that sounded wrong this morning, as though the melody had been turned inside out and fed back through the walls.
Tosia picked up the clock. The glass was warm. Not room-warm, not sun-warm, but warm in pulses, like a hand held against a heartbeat. She turned it over once in her palms, searching for a seam, a latch, anything that might explain the tiny shiver running through it.
Then she heard it.
A faint tapping from deep inside the clock.
Not the tick of the mechanism. A deliberate knock.
Almond hissed under his breath and backed away from the sill. Tosia held still, every muscle in her body drawn tight as the tapping came again, clearer this time, as if whatever was trapped inside had noticed her listening and was asking, very politely, to be let out.