Obadiah liked to hold his watch in his hand and observe time running out, to guess which twitch of the second hand would be the last—then rewind the gears and let them die again. He felt different each time they stopped even though the world around him continued. The sky did not fall. The ancient white pine he sat beneath did not disappear nor did the coppiced field that spread out before him. In the pine’s canopy, a squirrel scurried from limb to limb with bits of pinecone in its cheeks. Its feet scratched against the crumbly bark and let pieces fall down onto Obadiah’s head and shoulders. The squirrel had no tool to track time—only an internal rhythm marking when August grows old and September signifies autumn’s arrival. Time, Obadiah thought, was more than a watch. It could be felt. The watch was only a device of specificity. Obadiah knew this. Even still, he played. He loved the luster of the silver casing, his reflection in the watch’s face, the bold circle of numerals beneath.

He hated that he was going to bury it.

Obadiah had noticed a box while resting beneath the tree. Nights before, a heavy rain washed soil away from its roots and exposed a sharp corner of oxidized metal. He scratched away at the dirt and humus until the box was free and resting on a bed of needles spread like crimson brushstrokes across the ground. On the cover, barely visible beneath years of rust and stubborn clumps of dirt, a man was smiling with a long cigar between his teeth. The word “humo” was engraved in large capital letters on the front. A hook and latch held the container shut. He lifted the latch upward. It would not move so he struck the box with a heavy rock and the cover came open amidst a dull crush of breaking glass. Enclosed within was a lock of brown hair and a broken vial, both smeared with a viscous red fluid. Other admirers of the great pine must have used the box to leave something of themselves to bear time as long as the tree would. Obadiah wanted to leave something of himself, too, something he thought marked him more than his own flesh or blood.

A speeding ball of ice and dirt impervious to the greatest distances of space approached Earth much more quickly than the usual heavenly bodies the world had grown accustomed to. The people of this new time, years beyond Obadiah, lived without concern amidst ignorance justified by centuries of bliss, unaware of the immediate danger that would soon arrive. The only troubled were those troubled by themselves, psychosis, or perhaps, great loss. Anna was one of those troubled suffering through an unexplainable, unyielding urgency that turned her eyes from the night sky to the innermost cavities of her head. Far, was the Waldenesque fortune provided by the world. Closer and closer, were the disembodied footsteps of dementia. Anna was delicate like the skin of water, giving ever so little to the slightest touch. Like suns and moons to circling planets, thoughts of breaking visited her mind daily. She stood, hidden in a wind-swollen sea of sedges and grass after another full night of futile wandering through her labyrinthine mind. Saffron leaves ripped from the oaks and maples that encompassed the field and tumbled by grasping anything in their wake. Anna pulled one from her hair, careful not to let it crisp apart in her fingers. She released it into the breeze and watched it sail towards the dendritic arms of a great white pine that marked the path to her village.

Anna wished she was the leaf’s pilot with a course plotted to some specific destination, thrilling in its sweeping movements . . . back and forth, back and forth in the wind. Perhaps she was the pilot after all because she found herself beneath the hulking tree. There she lay down to laze away another day. The ground was soft with humus and the massive limbs of the tree kept the glaring sun from her eyes. A squirrel, distinctively cloaked in a white-bellied red coat, chattered in the branches, rushed headlong down the scaled bark of the tree, ignorant of her presence at first and then vanished into airy wisps of grass. A flock of honking geese traversed the sky, a persistent arrow of movement attempting to reach the south ahead the chilling grip of winter. They seemed so hurried and pressed by something—an invisible predator at their heels? Anna felt something else, too sharp to be the roaming tendrils of a white pine poking into her side. She rolled over and saw what seemed to be a corner of metal. Buried there was a small metal box sealed so tightly that when she pried it open strange air greeted her nose, a scent like blood and sulfur. Inside, tiny jewels of glass dazzled around a single object. She removed the watch, a thing so familiar, something she could have owned, carefully contained and placed in a hole for posterity. It couldn’t have been her doing, though. It had to have been an ancient person aware that one day far into the future such a common device would be treasured and fawned upon, wondered about, experimented with and possibly defined and used for purposes other than observation.

The watch was round and of silver, old and corroded. It neither ticked, nor did it tock like the poem tick, tock goes the watch. The Roman numerals and face were barely visible beneath the spider-webbed glass cover. She pondered the passing of time, something so unfamiliar. The day slipped away as Anna’s mind wandered. Its gears rotated and clicked like the watch’s should have some time else. What was it like, she wondered, to go from one time to the next? Was there anticipation? What was it like to be late or early? In which direction did the slight strips of metal move while its hidden mechanisms had life? Anna wanted to know if time was wonderful, if aging was grand, if it made you wise and grateful. Content. Troubles went away when she thought of time. Would they disappear were time to reappear?

There was no way for her to know, but the imaginings themselves were soothing, attractive like the lips of a phantom stranger, the possibility of a foreign touch. How could Anna dream, though, in a dream world? She could only think to herself about the relic instrument lying flat in her hand as whippoorwills named themselves from the field’s edge and nighthawks dove and whirred like jets through the dusky air. She held the watch long into the night, long after the familiar groups of stars revolved around their common center and succumbed to the purple haze of the emerging dawn. Only then did she loosen her loving grip and trace its circumference only cells deep with her thumb. Only then, startled by a fulminating roar and a light much too bright to be the rising sun, did her thumb press down against and turn the rough knob she’d so many times lightly brushed before.

The watch came alive.