MY WIFE AND I WERE AT  the clock shop, which was suspiciously devoid of clocks, suspiciously devoid of anything but us. We’d agreed to meet for one last hour, namely the witching hour. When she checked her pocket, her phone was gone. Maybe this is a sign, I said with the confidence of an aardvark. She said this is the absence of a sign, there is nothing in this room. I said maybe it’s a sign our time has run out: that’s called reverse psychology. She chuckled like an angel and I wanted to stuff it in my pocket. But my pockets were chock full of clocks: grandfathers, grandmothers, the daddy and mommy, aunts, uncles, cousins, the brothers and sons, the sisters and daughters, so much family jammed down the deep, dark wells affixed to my pants. And of course the wife clock, of course the phone, because that’s the man I am, not untrusting but just weak at the idea that she always needed to check how much time she was spending. But if I wanted to pocket her angel chuckle, I would need to make room. I fished out the wife clock from the bottom of myself and presented it piously as an offering to my angel. Emotion welled up within me and got stuck in my throat, so I compressed my chest once, twice, thrice and up and out came the Ben 10 Omnitrix watch my wife gifted to me when we were ten. My wife knelt down and blew off the ectoplasm. The hands went tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick until she wrapped the band around my ghostly hand and all the ticking stopped. The watch was not broken, this was the best it’d ever worked. My wife and I held each other and we knew that as soon as we left the clock shop, time would start again and likely pull us apart from each other. But in the clock shop, we had a moment, and we could make it last forever. •



Travis Shosa (they/them) is a writer from Spring, TX. Their poems and stories are featured or forthcoming in Stanchion, Maudlin House, BRUISER, Burial Magazine, Eulogy Press, BULLSHIT LIT, fifth wheel press, The Bloomin’ Onion, Some Words, Michigan City Review of Books, and others. They have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Their journalism has been featured in Pitchfork, Bandcamp Daily, The Line of Best Fit, PAPER, and others. They run Dodo Eraser, a lit mag and reading series.

Website | Twitter | Bluesky | Instagram