“Grandpa, Mr. Kishimoto is here again.”
Yoshimura didn’t even look up from his work. “Yeah,” he said, glasses still on.
Kishimoto — a man somewhere in his sixties — had brought in the same pocket watch at the same time of year last time too. Yoshimura had serviced it carefully, a fine old mechanical piece. This year he’d set it on the counter with the same words: “It’s gone off again.” Strange thing was, he didn’t seem bothered at all. If anything, he looked almost relieved. He bowed and said, “I’ll leave it with you.”
Misaki had only been helping out at the shop for about a year. But she’d already noticed something odd.
Come autumn, a different regular brought in an antique mantel clock. In spring, a woman with a cuckoo clock. In June, a man lugging a wall clock. Every single one of them said the same thing: It’s gone off again. Every single one of them had been fixed by Yoshimura.
“Maybe there’s something wrong with your repairs,” she finally said. She knew it came out blunt.
Yoshimura was quiet for a moment, polishing a watch case. Then:
“Mechanical watches don’t like magnetism.”
“Magnetism?”
“Tiny springs, tiny gears — they pick up a magnetic charge and they start losing time. That’s just how it is.”
“But every year, the same time?”
“More or less.”
And that was it.
Misaki looked it up. The magnetism thing was real — she found that quickly enough. But why the same season, year after year?
The answer was buried in a government research institute’s website. Earth’s magnetic field gets disrupted periodically, pushed around by something arriving from far away. Spring into summer. The turn of autumn. Forecasts existed. Nothing could stop it.
She checked the dates. Kishimoto’s visit and last year’s peak disturbance were less than a week apart.
“Hey, Grandpa —”
She reached for the ledger, and her hand stopped.
At the very bottom of the last page, in Yoshimura’s precise, ruler-straight handwriting, was a single line.
Next visit: early June.
Yoshimura appeared from the back room.
”…Well.”
A small pause.
“Best to hold onto Kishimoto’s watch for two weeks. He’ll be back around the same time again.”
Misaki flipped back through the ledger. Near the front, some old loose pages were tucked inside. The same careful handwriting — a record of cycles, dates going back and forth. The earliest entry was fifteen years ago.
In the back room, Yoshimura opened the case of Kishimoto’s pocket watch and got to work.