The Echo of Minutes and Hours
Give your old teddy a squeeze tonight… (he knows too much).
The shop’s lights faded to a shadow, and the door clicked shut with a gentle thud. Sixteen seconds passed before I stretched out my hands and adjusted my position on the dusty wooden shelf. Beside me, the silver locket shifted, its chain stretching as if she had been released from a long-held breath. The brass telescope one shelf below the silver locket and I rolled onto his side, eager for a breeze to ease the stiffness that had settled into his casing. The quill above us ruffled her feather. One by one, every item in Treasures & Tales awakened, stretching off the weight of our stillness as the memories within us started pulsing gently through the quiet of the night.
"Another one nearly bought me today," sighed the silver locket, her voice delicate and worn.
Crafted in Berlin in 1892, she was the oldest and wisest among us—a gift to a girl who had clasped her tightly to her chest as if she were a piece of her own heart. Perhaps she was. I knew the story well. The girl’s lover had given her the locket before he passed away, a promise of a future life hadn’t allowed them to fulfill. Stricken with grief, the girl could no longer bear to wear the locket, unable to endure the memories it held.
“Did she linger long?” I asked the locket, gently.
“Oh, yes,” the locket replied, twisting her tarnished clasp with a sigh. “She turned me over in her hands, traced the vines engraved on to my sides. It’s as if she could feel him... but she didn’t take me. They never do.”
In the silence that followed, I watched her lid tremble shut, and I knew it wasn’t just metal and silver that made her precious. She held within her the remnants of love—what many humans call the most powerful force on earth. Perhaps that’s why she felt each moment of abandonment so deeply, the pain lingering even though it had been well over a century since her owner’s demise.
Art By: (Hannah Arabella Gabling//The Underground)
The brass telescope cleared his throat. His voice was raspy, like metal scraping against metal.
“Humans don’t care about our histories anymore,” he muttered sadly, edging towards the tip of the shelf and positioning his lens towards the mirrors across the room so he could see the silver locket and me in its reflection. “Not like my boy did. He saved up for weeks, scavenging coins wherever he could, selling his marbles, even his favourite glass chess set — all to make me his.”
The telescope was proud, and rightfully so. He was crafted in 1990 and had once belonged to a boy with a mind like quicksilver and a heart determined to reach beyond the stars. Every night, the boy carried him up to the little sunroof in the attic, where he’d scrawl notes by candlelight, plot constellations, sketch the moon in its different phases, and dream up experiments he wanted to conduct in order to understand what was beyond the sky. He’d whisper grand promises to the telescope, pledging that it was only a matter of time before he would show him a planet no one had ever seen, even declaring he’d become president of that new world once he left Earth behind forever. Whenever the telescope spoke of “his boy,” the brass casing around his lens seemed to gleam a little brighter.
“Passion like that doesn’t come around much these days,” the telescope continued, his voice a mixture of pride and sadness. “Now, they just glance and squint, but they don’t feel it. They don’t appreciate us.”
I couldn’t argue. To most who came here, he was simply another relic. But to the boy, he had been a window into a whole other universe.
From a few shelves above, the sassy quill in a delicate inkwell scoffed. She shifted her weight, or lack thereof, towards the edge of the shelf. Then, she took a leap of faith, falling gracefully, until she landed right on top of the brass telescope. The fibers of her feather flared out in anger.
“Appreciation? Please! I haven’t been appreciated since last century. You know what I am now? A ‘period piece’– they hold me to pose for videos and pictures.” She huffed, her feather trembling with indignation.
The quill was beautiful, elegant, with gold detailing that hinted at class. Once, she belonged to a poet who spent hours writing, filling page after page with ink-stained secrets. He loved her words about love, the way her nib danced across parchment. She even had friends, a row of quills of different shapes and sizes. But that had been ages ago, before her value had been reduced to the occasional prop in some teenager’s “antique era”.
“I’ve been around the world,” the quill went on with a theatrical sigh, “but now that I’m old enough to be ‘vintage’– whatever that means, I’ve been stuck in this special shop for years.”
The telescope chuckled at the quill’s frustration. In an attempt to lighten her mood, he told her, “It’s far better to be here with us than to gather dust as someone’s passing fancy.”
I listened as the others shared their stories, the locket and the telescope with their tales of love, the quill and her fling with fashion. I had none of that. I had never belonged to anyone, not truly.
Crafted precisely 73 years, 8 months, 1 week and 3 days ago, I was a pocket watch that had been bought, gifted, and on two occasions, re-gifted, only to be tossed in a drawer, waiting in silence until someone else decided to pass me along once more.
My gold was polished, my gears wound, but I had never ticked in time with someone’s soul. I had no story of a heartbeat against me, no starlit roof, no inkwell companion. I sat here untouched, unloved, holding nothing but the echo of minutes and hours, wondering what it might feel like to be cherished as the others had been.
If only, just once, someone would pick me up, feel the weight of time in their hands, and let me be part of their world. Until then, I would remain here, ticking along to the endless passage of the years going by.
