Aaaaand Its Gone

Chapter 9 — The Repeating Hour

The clock in the front room still read 7:04.
Thomas had stopped trusting it, yet every morning he wound it again. The tick-tick lasted a handful of seconds, slowed, and then began the same rhythm all over. He struck a match, lit the lamp, blew it out. A faint wisp of smoke rose, hung in the air, and the smell returned—fresh, identical—as though it had never left.

The light through the curtains stayed pale and motionless, like a painting that refused to dry.

Margaret had begun keeping notes. A line of pencil on the kitchen wall—just a single mark for each morning. By her count they had woken to this same half-lit hour twelve times. The marks vanished every third dawn, the plaster clean and cold beneath her hand.

Small things changed: the chair under the window would face a different direction, a spoon would rest on the wrong side of the plate, Josephine’s hair ribbon shifting from blue to red. Margaret no longer tried to fix them. She simply watched, waiting to see what detail would betray the next reset.

That quiet act of watching became her only proof that anything was happening at all.

Josephine hummed at the table, chin resting in her palms. The tune began as a whisper and grew until two notes sounded at once—one just ahead of the other, slightly higher, as if another voice were joining from behind a thin wall.

Margaret froze. The second voice was her daughter’s, but older, worn with distance.

Josephine blinked slowly. “She remembers faster,” she said, without lifting her head.
“Who?”

“The me that goes first.”

The dust motes above her sketchbook trembled and formed faint rings in the air, the way water ripples from a skipped stone.

In the hallway mirror Thomas saw himself moving—a fraction early, as though his reflection had grown impatient. When he raised his hand, the mirrored hand followed a breath too soon. He spoke his own name; the reflection mouthed something else entirely.

He leaned close, trying to read the shape of the word. It looked like stay.

The air behind the glass shimmered. For an instant he thought he saw the attic beyond the mirror’s surface, the rafters glowing faintly, dust swirling upward instead of down.

A vibration climbed through the floorboards, deep and slow. The hum that had haunted the walls returned, but fuller now, alive. The hands of the clock began to spin and then stopped halfway to noon.

Josephine’s humming harmonized with it, perfect pitch. Objects around the room quivered: the tea cup rose an inch, the curtain lifted though there was no breeze. Then everything settled back exactly where it had been.

The attic door stood open. Light pooled at the top of the stairs—thin at first, then widening into a steady gold that smelled faintly of rain and iron.

Margaret reached the landing first. In the center of the attic, time seemed to waver; dust hung unmoving, motes glinting like tiny suns. She turned slowly, feeling the pulse of the house around her.

“We’re not trapped in time,” she said. “Time is trapped in us.”

The sound of her own voice echoed twice, the second echo arriving a heartbeat before the first.

The world blinked.

They were seated at breakfast again. The clock showed 7:04. The window light identical, the air still. Thomas poured coffee that steamed without cooling. Margaret’s pencil lay unsharpened on the table.

But Josephine looked different—something in the angle of her face, the steadiness of her eyes. She reached for the spoon, and for the briefest moment, her shadow reached before her.