Winner (Short Story) - July, 2025
The Clockmaker’s Paradox! by Maryam Tanveer - Pakistan
In the village of Eldros, where moonlight hummed over cobbled streets and cats spoke in riddles, there stood a crooked little shop called Time’s Tangle. Hidden behind velvet curtains and a garden of hourglass-shaped flowers, the shop belonged to a man named Icarus Vellin—a clockmaker whose fame never reached beyond the whispering trees. Not because his clocks were ordinary, but because they weren’t. They defied understanding. Some clocks ticked sideways. Others ran backward, not merely in time but in logic. A few rang chimes in languages never spoken. But one clock, sitting beneath a dome of glass and surrounded by a slow swirl of stardust, stood apart from the rest. It had no hands. No numbers. Only a shifting galaxy in its face that pulsed like a heart. The people of Eldros whispered that Icarus had never been born. That he had emerged from a moment of broken time—stepping into the world already late, already ancient. He had silver eyes that blinked out of sync and a way of speaking like he was guessing at the right year.
No one took the rumors seriously—no one, that is, except the cats. And the cats in Eldros were not ordinary. They curled around sundials and nested in old grandfather clocks, their tails twitching to unheard songs. Some said they remembered the stars they came from.
One night, during a thunderstorm stitched with green lightning, a boy named Lio wandered into the shop. The door, which never opened unless it was exactly the right time, creaked on its own as he approached. He had heard a ticking in his dreams—steady, calling—and it led him here, though he wasn’t quite sure how.
Inside, time folded around him like silk. Walls stretched impossibly tall, filled with clocks stacked to the heavens. Some floated, some melted. The air smelled like oil and starlight...
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