Continued from Day 99 of 35:

He took them apart, stripped them to their gears, cleaned and reassembled, and still, the ornate French mantel clock and the cuckoo were a millisecond apart, and the Grandfather was always a full tick-tock behind—its chime the last to announce the passing hour. I came home once and slept as best I could in my father’s asynchronicity. In the morning, I knew what he was after. I never spent another night with those clocks. I never saw my father again. He eventually left that house, and everything behind, and when he died, in a small house in Apple Valley, California there were no mechanical clocks in any of the rooms. Time could not be heard there. There was just a dog barking, unfed for four days, and there was his body, full of opiates, and naked.