Tick…toc…tick…toc…tick…toc…tick…

The other things in the house might sleep, but the clock had a job to do: keep watch. It did so, day in, day out, and—most importantly—all through the night. It never stopped its vigilance, holding the beat steadily and patiently, making sure everything stayed just right through the dark hours. During the day, the people moved around; the Daughter often left and the Son was almost never home anymore, and the Father and Mother both came in and out. But, when the people came back, it was in a flurry of activity: shouts, laughs, stories, slammed doors, and clacking forks and plates echoed throughout the house while the clock kept the time. During the day, the people were usually very good at looking after themselves—all save the Daughter with her phone, that was. But people slept, same as things, and they needed someone to look after them at night.

The air in the house was still and somewhat dusty; it had been some time since the Daughter had done her weekly chore of dusting. The air didn’t bother her though; the window was open in her room upstairs, letting in the cool night air while she slept, and the breeze kept her room clear. She wasn’t very dutiful. Many times, the clock had seen her shirk her responsibilities in order to lounge around and play on her phone. The phones sometimes made the clock sad. It was uncommon for anyone in the house to need the clock anymore.

Still, despite the Daughter’s face being glued to its screen, the phone never looked back. It was a dead thing, like so many other things in the house had become. The sofa, the rug, the mirror, the oven, the television; none were alive, though they had been, once. The rug was trod upon so often and cleaned so irregularly that it became threadbare and weak, too used to the footsteps that ground the dirt into it. And then, it had died. It had been the clock’s best friend.

The clock was happy to do its job, even if it was becoming lonelier as the years went on. First, the oven had died; it went from having a voice of its own, a jolly, deep bass of a voice, to being merely a thing when the Son and Daughter grew up and came home for dinner less often. Then the rug had died, and its corpse was left on the floor, unheeded and covered in dirt. Then the Daughter got her phone and stopped looking at the clock. The spring inside the clock gave a discordant sproing, and it skipped a beat.

The clock looked around, shocked. Such a thing had never happened before, and it quickly made sure that no one else had heard, counting its solitude as a blessing for the first time. It looked back over itself, assessing the problem, and found a slight wearing on one gear. It huffed and put the thoughts of the rug and oven aside, focusing back down on keeping watch over the house’s residents. It wouldn’t do to skip a beat again. It wouldn’t do at all.

Tick…toc…tick…toc…tick…