Map of Days

Richard can’t stop thinking about the clock. He lies in bed each night listening to its tick-tocking, to the pendulum’s heavy swing. Why does his granddad open its old doors in secret and walk into the darkness beyond?

One night, too inquisitive to sleep, Richard tiptoes from his bed, opens the cherry wood door of the grandfather clock, and steps inside. There, in a strange, nebulous twilight, he sees the face the Earth, locked forever in a simulated world, where green things seem to grow in the semblance of trees and plants, from unreal soil. In this quasi-world they sit together for many nights, the face and the boy, talking quietly of creation and the beginning of all things. Moved by the face’s ancient tale of mysterious, magnetic love, Richard longs to release him. So one night he secretly winds back the hands of the grandfather clock, and changes time forever…