EVERYDAY, WITH DR. ELIAS LOCKE
Thursday, October 29, 2026
The Missing Minute
A fictional column from the Electric Icarus universe, created by Jon LaBelle.
Thursday.
At 11:59 this morning, the courthouse clock skipped straight to 12:01. No chime. No warning. Just a minute missing from the middle of Thursday.
The mayor called an emergency meeting. In our town, this meant three people, a folding table, and a pot of coffee nobody admitted making.
“We have lost sixty seconds,” he announced.
“From the clock,” I said.
“From the county,” he corrected. “The distinction is under review.”
Miss Ada Bell, who had maintained the courthouse clock since before the county learned to spell maintenance, arrived carrying a brass toolbox and a pocket watch that disagreed with every clock in the room.
“A gear could have slipped,” she said.
“Could it have slipped exactly one minute?” asked the mayor.
“A gear doesn’t know what a minute is. That’s your department.”
Mrs. Pritchard, the county clerk, opened a form titled APPLICATION FOR RESTORATION OF MISSING TIME. The form requested the date, approximate location, and last known emotional condition of the missing minute.
“What do we put for emotional condition?” she asked.
“Overworked,” I suggested.
The mayor considered this seriously.
Outside, the town behaved as though the minute had personally offended it. A barber demanded compensation for an unfinished haircut. The hardware store offered sixty-second discounts, which lasted forty-five seconds. A man at the bus stop claimed he’d been waiting a lifetime, although the bus was only eight minutes late.
Ada climbed the clock tower. I followed, because curiosity has never once consulted my knees.
Behind the great dial, the mechanism ticked with the ordinary indifference of machinery. Ada checked the escapement, adjusted a spring, and announced that nothing mechanical could explain the jump.
“Then perhaps the minute wasn’t lost,” I said. “Perhaps it was put somewhere.”
On a shelf beneath the gears sat a small glass jar, labeled ONE MINUTE — FOR EMERGENCIES. Inside was a soft gold light, no larger than a firefly.
“That wasn’t here yesterday,” Ada said.
“Yesterday has a remarkably unreliable filing system.”
The mayor wanted the jar placed in evidence. Mrs. Pritchard wanted a receipt. Ada wanted to know who had installed a shelf in her clock tower.
I wanted to know what counted as an emergency.
Down in the square, a little girl was attempting to tell her grandfather about a drawing. He kept glancing at his watch. She stopped speaking halfway through the best part.
I carried the jar downstairs and set it on the bench beside them.
“I believe,” I told the grandfather, “you have been granted an extension.”
He looked at the jar, then at his granddaughter. Finally he put his watch away and asked her to start again.
She did. There was a house with six doors, a purple tree, and a dog large enough to require its own weather forecast. The grandfather listened to every detail.
The light in the jar faded. Above us, the courthouse clock struck twelve—once, politely, and very late.
Mrs. Pritchard crossed out LOST and wrote USED FOR INTENDED PURPOSE.
The mayor declared the emergency resolved, although he requested a committee to determine whether future minutes could be stored in bulk.
Ada locked the clock tower and told him that if he wanted extra time, he could try arriving early.
I’ve spent much of my life measuring strange things. Distance between worlds. The interval between a question and the trouble it causes. The time required for a sensible person to leave a room after I announce an experiment.
But a minute is a peculiar thing. You can lose it on a clock and still find it in a conversation.
If the universe ever asks for that minute back, I intend to tell it we’re using it.
