The Handless Clock in the Canteen

The wall clock in the building site canteen fell off its nail at half past seven. It hit the floor, spun twice and lost both its hands. Nobody was sad about it. The clock had been wrong for years.

Neha was the new apprentice joiner, and she had been on the site for just two weeks. The foreman gave her a simple job. She had to find something to hang in the gap. Forty workers needed to see when their break ended.

She went to the salvage shed behind the cabins. It was full of things the crew had saved from the old cinema they were pulling down. There were brass door handles, torn velvet seats and a box of dusty light bulbs. At the bottom of a crate, wrapped in a cinema curtain, she found a round clock.

It was heavy and beautiful. The case was dark wood, and the glass was clean. But the face was completely empty. There were no numbers, no marks and no hands at all. And yet, when she held it to her ear, it ticked.

"It works," she said to nobody.

She carried it to the canteen and found Kai, who helped the cook on weekdays. Kai was seventeen, and he spent most mornings stirring a pot that was bigger than he was.

"That is the strangest clock I have ever seen," he said. "How do you read it?"

"I do not think you do," said Neha. "But it is better than a hole in the wall."

She hung it on the nail and stepped back. The ticking filled the room, slow and deep, like a heartbeat in a very large animal. Kai shrugged and went back to his soup.

At ten o'clock, the cook left to collect the delivery, and Kai was alone. He had started the lentil soup early. The pot sat on the biggest flame, and the flame was as high as it could go. By eleven, the pot should have been bubbling. It was not.

By half past eleven, the soup was only warm. Kai put his hand over the pot, and then he took it away again, puzzled. The steam rose very, very slowly. It curled up from the surface like smoke in a dream. Then it hung above the cooker.

Neha came in at a quarter to twelve for a drink of water. She stopped in the doorway.

"Why is it so quiet in here?" she asked.

"I don't know," said Kai. "But my soup has not boiled, and the break starts in fifteen minutes."

"Fifteen minutes by whose watch?" asked Neha. She looked at the clock, and the ticking seemed to answer her.

Kai picked up a wooden spoon from the counter. For a joke, he let it go. It did not drop. It sank toward the floor so slowly that he could have read the tiny letters on its handle. Neha watched it with her mouth open.

"Did you do that?" she whispered.

"I just let go," said Kai.

They stared at each other. Outside the window, they could hear the usual noise of the site. The cement mixer turned, and a man shouted about a ladder. Inside, everything moved like honey. A fly floated by the window and seemed to forget how to fly.

"The clock," said Neha slowly. "The ticking is slower than my pulse. What if it is slowing down the room?"

Kai laughed, but it was a nervous laugh. "Time does not slow down in canteens."

"Then explain the spoon," said Neha.

He could not. The spoon was still falling.

The workers began to arrive at five to twelve, the way they always did. They came in loud and hungry, with dust on their boots. Within seconds, they went quiet. Some of them blinked, and some looked at their watches. A man in a yellow helmet said that the door felt heavier than usual.

"Lunch is not ready," Kai announced. His voice came out higher than he wanted. "Give me a minute."

"We only have thirty," said the foreman from the doorway. "You know that."

Kai looked at the soup. Neha looked at the clock. A very clear idea arrived, the way a nail finds its place when you stop pushing.

"If the clock is the problem," she said, "then the answer is simple. We take it out."

She dragged a chair to the wall and stood on it. The clock was warm now, almost like a living thing. She lifted it off its nail with both hands. The ticking changed at once and became faster and lighter. The sound of the room snapped back around her.

Kai's spoon hit the floor with a clatter. The fly shot out of the window. The soup gave a great, rolling bubble. A cloud of steam rose from the pot and filled the kitchen with the smell of garlic.

"Right," said the foreman, who had not noticed anything strange. "Now we're talking."

Neha carried the clock out through the back door and across the yard. She did not know where to put it. In the end, she hung it on the wire fence beside the window. It looked lost there, a dark wooden circle against the grey mesh and the bright, empty sky.

Behind her, the canteen came alive. Trays banged, chairs scraped, and somebody asked for more rice. Kai ladled out soup as fast as he could. He passed Neha a bowl through the open window without a word. She ate it standing in the yard, with the clock ticking beside her.

The break lasted exactly thirty minutes. For once, nobody ran late.

When the afternoon shift began, the workers went back to the cranes and the scaffolding. Neha helped Kai clean the pots, and they washed up in a tired silence. At last Kai dried his hands and leaned on the sink.

"We cannot tell anyone about this," he said.

"They would not believe us," said Neha.

"Maybe we can use it," said Kai. "A clock that slows time. Imagine what it could do on Friday afternoons."

"Or on a Monday morning," said Neha, and she smiled for the first time all day.

They left it on the fence for the rest of the afternoon, to be safe. At five o'clock, the site went silent, and the crew drove home in their dusty vans. The foreman locked the gate. Neha and Kai stayed behind to turn off the last lights.

The sun was low and gold when they stood in the yard. The fence cast long shadows across the gravel, and the cranes stood still above the empty building. The handless clock hung on its wire, ticking slowly in the evening air.

A swallow flew past the canteen window. For a moment, it seemed to stay in the air a little longer than it should. Then it passed over the roof and was gone.

Neha watched it go. Beside her, the clock kept its own quiet time, and the long day seemed to rest.