The Obituary Clock

Elias referred to it, in the privacy of his own dour thoughts, as his daily OOTD: Outfit of the Day. Black wool trousers, black cotton shirt, black leather apron stained with oil and time. It was the uniform of the Keeper, a role he hadn’t chosen so much as inherited, like a congenital illness. His real passion, his little side hustle, involved charcoal sticks and parchment, sketching the faces of strangers in the cobbled market square, a silent rebellion against the grim finality of his actual job.

His job was the clock.

It sat in the highest room of the city’s central spire, a behemoth of mahogany and brass, its pendulum a slow, metronomic heartbeat for all of Aethelburg. It did not merely tell time. At unpredictable intervals, with a groan of gears and a sharp clatter, it would eject a tightly rolled scroll of parchment from a slot in its base. On the scroll, in faultless, mournful calligraphy, would be an obituary. Pre-written.

Elias was in the middle of a long and satisfying period of quiet quitting. He’d polish the brass, oil the necessary gears, and collect the scrolls without reading them, filing them away in the lead-lined drawers as mandated by the Proctorum. He’d found that not knowing whose time was up made the soot-grey sky seem a fraction brighter.

But today, the clock had shuddered with unusual violence. The scroll it produced was warm to the touch. Curiosity, that old traitor, got the better of him. He unrolled it.

*Althea Finch. Aged 23. To be concluded by a surfeit of joy.*

Elias’s breath caught. Althea Finch sold Sunblush flowers from a cart by the eastern gate. She was a splash of impossible colour in the city’s muted palette, a girl whose laughter was a public utility. A surfeit of joy? The phrase was poetic, absurd. A death sentence that read like a compliment.

He found her cart surrounded by her usual admirers. She had a kind of effortless gravity, a charisma so potent the old-timers called it ‘rizz’ before the word even meant anything. She was in what she called her “starlight era,” wearing a dress the colour of a summer dusk and weaving shimmer-thread into her braids. It was her GRWM, her Get Ready With Me, she’d once told a customer, “to face the world with a bit of magic.”

Elias, clutching the terrible scroll in his pocket, felt a cold dread. The Proctorum’s first rule was non-interference. The Mechanism, as they called the clock’s grim foresight, was absolute. To question it was heresy. To interfere was unthinkable. They were gaslighting the whole city into believing free will was a myth.

“A single Mourning-Tear fern, Keeper?” Althea’s voice pulled him from his trance. She smiled, and it was like a lamp being lit.

“No,” Elias said, his voice hoarse. “I… I came to ask you something. About your flowers.”

He had to be careful. He gestured vaguely at a pot of Gloom-Petals, their velvety darkness seeming to drink the light. “You handle these all day. Does the… the essence of them ever get to be too much?”

She laughed, a sound like wind chimes. “Oh, you mean the vibes? You get used to it. The key is balance. A little Gloom-Petal to appreciate the Sunblush. A touch of Worry-Wort to make the Joy-Vine sweeter. It’s a delicate dance.” She winked. “IYKYK.”

If you know, you know. But he didn’t know. Not really. The obituary mentioned a surfeit of *joy*. Not sorrow, not worry. He looked at the lush, golden Joy-Vine climbing the side of her cart. Its scent was intoxicating, thick with the promise of euphoria.

“Are you ever… tempted?” he asked, his voice barely a whisper. “To just… surround yourself with the good stuff? Skip the balance?”

Althea’s smile faltered for a fraction of a second. A little cloud passed over her sunlit face. “Some people think happiness is a destination. They don’t understand the journey. They want the feeling without the living.” Her gaze drifted away. “It’s a bit delulu, if you ask me. To think you can have a high without a low.”

That was it. That was the crack in the façade. She knew the danger.

He spent the rest of the day in a fugue state, the clock’s ticking in the spire a countdown to a murder. At dusk, he abandoned his post and went back to the eastern gate. Althea’s cart was gone. Panic seized him. He pictured the obituary, *a surfeit of joy*. He imagined her in her small apartment above the bakery, so overwhelmed by the magical fragrance of her own stock that her heart simply… stopped.

He ran, taking the steps to her floor two at a time. He found her door slightly ajar. Pushing it open, he saw her. She was not dead. She was standing in the middle of her room, which was filled, wall to wall, with blooming, radiant, golden Joy-Vine. The air was so thick with its scent it was almost liquid. Althea’s eyes were wide, her pupils dilated, a beatific, empty smile on her face as she gently touched a petal. She was drowning in it.

This was the core of it all. Not cottagecore, not goblincore, but something he’d call overdose-core. Pure, unfiltered, lethal bliss.

“Althea,” he said, his own head swimming.

She didn’t seem to hear him. She was humming, swaying as she prepared one last, massive bundle.

He couldn’t drag her out. He couldn’t destroy the plants. That was not his way. His side hustle, his art—that was his way. With trembling hands, he pulled out a stick of charcoal and a fresh sheet of parchment. He didn’t sketch her as she was now, lost in a floral fever dream.

He drew her as he saw her at the market. Laughing. Her braids messy, a smudge of dirt on her cheek. He drew the Mourning-Tear fern and the spiky Worry-Wort right next to the Sunblush. He drew the balance. He drew the journey, not the destination. He drew her life, not her high.

He walked into the golden haze, his lungs burning, and held the sketch in front of her face.

“This is you,” he croaked, his voice cracking. “Not this. *This*.”

Her vacant eyes focused on the drawing. The humming stopped. The serene smile on her face wavered, then broke, like a reflection in disturbed water. A single tear traced a path through the golden light reflecting on her cheek, and she whispered a single word.

“Oh.”

She looked from the drawing to the suffocating jungle around her, as if seeing it for the first time. The spell was broken. Slowly, deliberately, she reached out and pushed open a window. The cool, damp night air rushed in, smelling of rain and soot and ordinary, complicated life. It was the most beautiful thing Elias had ever smelled.

Back in the spire, the hour of Althea Finch’s predicted death came and went. The Obituary Clock remained silent. The scroll in Elias’s pocket now felt like nothing more than a piece of misprinted paper. He looked from the silent, hulking clock to the charcoal on his fingers. His quiet quitting was over. His real work, it seemed, was just beginning.