Gabriel Jeroschewitz, May 4th, 2025. Dedicated to my stepfather. And all the Humans and their families whose loved ones have had Dementia or Alzheimer’s
Kugel would complain that time was behaving poorly.
The street was not so much a street as a misunderstanding between buildings. It curved upon itself without logic, presenting unexpected dead ends and sudden, pointless widenings where a few tired cobbles lay scattered like discarded teeth. Here lived people accustomed to the gentle, persistent pressure of the improbable nudging against the everyday. We, who watched from windows draped with lace yellowed by time rather than dust, had learned to see the world through a particular kind of lens, one that magnified the peculiar and allowed the merely ordinary to fade into a blurry background.
Our street, which had no name anyone bothered to remember consistently, housed, among other quiet marvels, the family of Mr. Kugel. Mr. Kugel, a man whose beard seemed less like hair and more like spun brass filings, was a retired watchmaker. But his retirement was not one of leisure; it was a deep, obsessive dive into the very fabric of time itself. He maintained a small, cluttered workshop at the back of his narrow house, its single window facing our row, often glowing late into the night with a weak oil lamp.
It began subtly. Mr. Kugel would complain that time was behaving poorly. It was, he insisted, unruly. Minutes lingered when they should have hurried. Hours vanished behind the back of the sun. He spoke of time not as a river, but as a capricious bird, prone to fluttering away or perching stubbornly where it wasn’t wanted. His initial efforts were conventional enough – regulating clocks, oiling gears. But these were merely skirmishes. He soon escalated to the full-blown war he waged daily against the temporal disorder he perceived.
His most ambitious project involved collecting what he termed “stray moments.” According to Mr. Kugel, time often detached itself from the general flow, particularly around old, neglected, or deeply thought-about objects. An antique armchair, for instance, could hold decades. A forgotten teacup might brim with a Sunday afternoon from years past. He developed an intricate capture system, using nets woven from fine copper wire and jars of various sizes lined with velvet to cushion the fragile moments he trapped.
We, his neighbours, watched from our windows, initially with polite amusement, then with a growing, uneasy fascination. We would see Mr. Kugel stalking his small garden, net in hand, making sudden, awkward lunges at a particularly ancient rose bush or a discarded gardening boot. He would carefully transfer his invisible catch into a jar, screw the lid shut with a triumphant, if slightly breathless, flourish, and label it meticulously. Labels like “Fragment of Last Thursday’s Rain,” “Half an Hour Lost Near the Cistern,” or worryingly, “Unknown Moment, Possibly from the Early 1900s.”
The true comedy, however, began when Mr. Kugel started using these moments. He believed he could reintroduce them into the world and redistribute them for greater temporal harmony. If he felt a morning was dragging, he might open a jar labelled “Three Brisk Minutes from a Monday.” We would all experience a strange, sudden urge to hurry, a feeling of skipping a heartbeat in the day’s rhythm. If he deployed “A Leisurely Quarter Hour from a Sunday Nap,” the street would collectively yawn, and even the most diligent peddlers would find themselves leaning against walls, eyes glazed with unexpected drowsiness.
The memorable incident was with the “Lost Fortnight from Behind the Wardrobe.” Mr. Kugel had found this significant chunk of time lurking in the neglected corner of a large, dusty armoire. Convinced it was too valuable to waste, he released it slowly, adding a little to each day. The result was catastrophic. Our days became elongated, elastic things. The sun would take an eternity to cross the sky. Meals seemed to last for hours. Children forgot the day of the week, their games stretching into timeless, weary marathons. People developed an unsettling stillness, a tendency to pause mid-stride, mid-sentence, as if waiting for the borrowed fortnight to catch up. Mr. Kugel, oblivious in his workshop, merely noted that time felt “unusually viscous” and began brewing special teas he claimed would help the minutes flow more freely.
His relationship with objects deepened as well. Following his peculiar logic, he believed that objects didn’t just store time, but were sometimes repositories for other, more fundamental principles. For instance, a particular chair in his living room was not merely furniture; he declared it the essence of “waiting.” One could sit in it, but its purpose was to embody expectation. He would talk to it, asking how long it had been waiting, what exactly it was waiting for. The chair, naturally, offered no reply, but Mr. Kugel nodded sagely, interpreting its silence as profound.
His boots, scuffed and worn, were deemed by him to be “distilled journeys.” He would polish them with reverence, recalling every path they had taken, every puddle they had encountered. Sometimes, he claimed, if he listened closely, he could hear the echo of distant marketplaces or forest paths emanating from the soles. His wife, a weary woman who moved through their house like a sigh made visible, ironed pillowcases and pretended not to hear her husband’s conversations with footwear.
The most comical, and perhaps unsettling, phase came when Mr. Kugel decided that specific individuals on the street were not entirely themselves, but were somehow ‘composites’ of various materials and forgotten intentions. He peered at people with a critical eye, as if assessing the fabric quality or the spring’s tension. Old Mrs. Dresner, with her sharp angles and perpetually creased face, he declared was “mostly newspaper, with a binding of dried glue.” He would approach her cautiously, murmuring about print quality and the dangers of dampness. Young Josef, the baker’s boy, with his cheerful plumpness, was clearly “kneaded dough, still rising,” and Mr. Kugel once tried to pat him down, explaining the importance of even fermentation.
He concluded that his body was a complex mechanism prone to the usual ailments of flesh and bone and mechanical failures. A creak in his knee was a joint needing oiling, and a headache was a gear slipping. He developed a peculiar tick, where his head would jerk sideways every few seconds, like a clock resetting its pendulum. He insisted it was a vital function, keeping his internal time synchronized.
These were the times we found ourselves stifling laughter behind cupped hands, or turning quickly from the window lest he catch us watching. Yet, there was a strange dignity in Mr. Kugel’s madness. He pursued his theories with such earnest conviction, such meticulous, if misapplied, logic, that it lent his bizarre activities an unavoidable, undeniable reality within the confines of our street. His house became a temporal anomaly, its internal rhythm decoupled from the rest of the world. Visitors would leave feeling subtly jet-lagged, convinced they had arrived too early or late for their appointment.
The hourglass became a particularly potent symbol for him. He acquired several, placing them on every available surface. He didn’t see them as measuring time’s passage, but as miniaturized landscapes where time could be observed falling, grain by grain. He spent hours watching the sand, claiming to discern individual moments in their descent – tiny, shimmering specks of the past accumulating into the growing mound of the future. His fascination with the falling sand often made him forget practical matters, standing motionless for long stretches. At the same time, dinner burned, or a customer waited patiently for a clock repair that he would never begin.
Life on our street under the informal reign of Mr. Kugel’s temporal experiments was a constant negotiation with the absurd. We checked our watches exaggeratedly, trying to anchor ourselves to external time. We learned to interpret the sudden silences or bursts of activity on the street as indicators of which “moment jar” Mr. Kugel might have opened. We lived, in essence, under the sign of his peculiar hourglass, where reality was not a fixed quantity but a fluid, malleable substance, constantly being reformed by the strange, earnest hands of a retired watchmaker who saw the world not just as it was, but as it might be, if only time would behave itself. And in this bizarre, comic world, perhaps, we understood time and ourselves a little better than those who only lived in the measured, predictable flow. For in our street, the clock didn’t just tick; sometimes, if you listened carefully, it sighed.
