Chapter 1: The Plainest Clock in the House

The simplest clock in the house was the oldest clock in the house, a plain wall clock with an ordinary brass rim that badly needed to be polished. The hands had stopped spinning in their glass case years ago, and now the ingredient of time had forged the hands in a way so that they would never be able to move, but would always remain fixed at the time 11:21.
11:21 was the time on July the 24, 1996 that Mrs. Murray’s black cat had chosen to take an interest in the Jones’ fishpond. The garbage man was pulling away from number twenty four on Maple Street. The newspapers had already arrived at the homes and had been taken indoors. The new newspaper boy, Derek, was more efficient than his predecessor Allen, and was always prompt. Mr. Stanley had the day off, and was sitting at his kitchen table reading the newspaper which Derek had delivered while Mrs. Stanley was making toast for their afternoon brunch on the patio.
It was an ordinary day on Maple Street and an ordinary day for Rachael, the freckled girl who worked as a bank teller in her parent’s bank. She had gone to work, worked the morning shift, and then gone home. At 1:00 she would go back and work an afternoon shift until 6:00.
The radio was blasting Queen, and she was singing along to “I want it all” at the top of her lungs in the wrong key. Nobody heard her. Her parents were both still at the bank, and the only person who might be there to here was the mailman. On that particular day, however, the mailman was running late after an argument he had gotten into with his oldest daughter over the clothes she was wearing, so he did not hear Rachael’s off-key singing.
The song ended and a commercial came on. Rachael flicked the radio off, not wanting to hear the anchor’s supposed ‘great joke.’ The whistle of the tea kettle filled the void of empty silence. Rachael removed the kettle from the burner and poured herself some tea.
She was nineteen years old with sandy brown hair and grey eyes. She was the kind of girl who the boys had referred to as having a ‘butter face’ back in high school and did not have a whole lot going for her. She knew it also. She knew that the slacks that she was wearing were not exactly form fitting, and that even if they had been a size smaller they would not show off a flattering figure. She was aware that her button-down yellow collared shirt, although her favorite color, was not the most flattering color on her. She had put a light amount of makeup around her eyes just to remind anyone who might look at her that her eyes were there. Her lips were small, her eyebrows thin and her nose normal.
The tea she was sipping was black, and it would have been too hot if Rachael had not added milk.
Rachael looked up at the old antique clock to check to make sure she would not be late for work, and then remembered that the old antique clock had never worked, and that none of the clocks in the house worked.
She finished her tea and left. That summer would be the last summer where anything normal would happen; where the breeze would float in something a little less than mundane, and the most interesting thing would be Mrs. Murray’s cat which had given up trying to catch a fish. Rachael felt that her life would remain stationary like the old antique clock that never ticked. She was unaware that the hands of her life were about to begin to spin into motion.