Every morning, Thomas woke to find his alarm clock slightly heavier than the day before. At first, the change was barely perceptible – mere grams added to its brass frame overnight. By the end of the first week, he needed both hands to lift it.
“Something’s wrong with my alarm clock,” he mentioned to his colleague Sarah during their coffee break.
She gave him an odd look. “Have you tried buying a new one?”
“It’s not that simple,” Thomas replied, watching the steam rise from his cup. “This one… it holds memories.”
The clock had belonged to his father, its gentle ticking a constant companion throughout his childhood. Now, as an accountant living alone in his sterile apartment, that mechanical heartbeat was his only connection to the past.
By the second week, the clock had grown to the weight of a small child. Thomas had to reinforce his bedside table with steel brackets.
“Maybe you should see someone about this,” Sarah suggested, genuine concern in her voice.
“See who exactly?” Thomas chuckled darkly. “A clock psychiatrist?”
The weight continued to increase exponentially. The floor beneath began to crack. His downstairs neighbor, Mrs. Henderson, knocked on his door one evening.
“There’s a bulge forming in my ceiling,” she said, wringing her hands. “Right below your bedroom.”
Thomas nodded apologetically. “I’m dealing with a… heavy situation.”
That night, lying in bed, he finally addressed the clock directly: “What are you trying to tell me?”
The ticking seemed to pause for a moment before resuming its relentless march forward.
By the end of the month, the clock weighed as much as a car. The building’s structural integrity was compromised. Evacuation notices appeared in the lobby.
Sarah visited him one last time before the building was cleared. “This isn’t just about the clock, is it?”
Thomas sat on his couch, staring at the bedroom door, behind which lay the now-immovable timepiece. “Dad always said time was the heaviest burden we carry.”
“And what do you think?”
“I think…” he paused, considering. “I think it’s not time that weighs us down, but our resistance to its passage.”
The next morning, Thomas woke to find the clock floating gently above his bedside table, light as a feather. Its face appeared somehow softer, more forgiving. The time it displayed was neither forward nor backward, but somehow sideways – a dimension of time he had never considered before.
He reached out to touch it, and as his fingers brushed its surface, both he and the clock vanished, leaving behind only the echo of a tick that somehow sounded like laughter.
Mrs. Henderson would later swear she heard that same laugh emanating from the crack in her ceiling, though it seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once. Sarah, cleaning out Thomas’s desk, found only a small note: “Time isn’t heavy unless you try to hold onto it.”
The building still stands, and sometimes, on particularly quiet nights, new tenants report hearing the faint sound of ticking coming through their walls – keeping perfect time with something other than seconds.