The Clock Without Hands: The Epic of Time That Forgot to Move

On a morning without a date, the city wakes to find its clocks still working with their hands vanished, and a man carrying a leather case and a small watch rushes into the Museum of Time to ask the guard what time it is. He finds a sundial without sunlight, an hourglass whose sand refuses to fall and a calendar of blank pages, and the golden clock tells him it lost its hands because humans turned them into whips. Outside, trains stop and brides and grooms wait outside their halls, and people begin looking at the sky again; in the basement a minute stands trial for being lost, a child who does not know his age tells the man they are the same age, and an old man waits before a closed door for the tomorrow he promised his late wife. When every clock stops, the sun, the wind and the rivers carry on, and behind a tiny door in the clock face the man finds a mirror showing him as a child, a young man, a grown man, an old man and then an empty chair. He sees his own shadow become the clock's hand and leaves without looking at his watch, and the book ends with the truth that he had been the hand from the beginning, circling the face of life while time was measuring him.