The clock in the Brennan house ran slow. Not by much — seven minutes over the course of a week, which anyone might explain away with old springs, a winding forgotten. Nora had explained it away for three months before she noticed that the clocks in the rest of town ran fast. Not by much. Just enough that when she checked her phone and then the kitchen clock, a particular math became unavoidable: she was losing twenty-two minutes every week, and she did not know yet what was happening during them.
She began keeping a journal. Nothing dramatic — she was not that kind of woman, the kind who goes straight to dramatic conclusions. She wrote down what she ate and what she thought and who she spoke to, and she began to notice that the entries did not always follow each other in the way memories should. Tuesday bled into Thursday. A conversation with her neighbor Margaret appeared in the journal twice, word for word, on dates five days apart. When she asked Margaret about it, Margaret only smiled and said she did not remember.
The thing Nora could not reconcile, the thing that kept her sitting in the kitchen at 3 a.m. listening to the slow clock tick, was that nothing felt wrong during the missing minutes. She did not come to with blood on her hands or gaps in her understanding of herself. Whatever happened during the hollow hours, she came out of them feeling rested. This, she had decided, was the most frightening part. Things that take something from you should feel like loss.
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