At precisely 9:00 p.m. the round white faces ceased glowing and fell into shadow. The slick black bag was tied by freezing hands and the heavy feet trudged through the snow back to the fire-lit house.

But still the gears turned, and still the clocks ticked. The cold hands swung from number to number, pausing over each to reverberate with their own energy. Soon, the trucks would come to haul off old memories while the cold whiteness of the world would slide back into the ground and the air would ring with the heat of far-off deserts that steamed up the moon. On that day, the ticking would finally forget to keep coming and the Earth would take in a short breath of anticipation, but everyone that walked upon its surface would fail to notice. On that day, time would forget to exist.

Inside the house, all was normal. When it felt like ten o'clock, the mother, the father, and the two children went to bed.

Sometime between what seemed like seven and eight in the morning, a package arrived on the doorstep. Within two hours of noon, it was let in. Scissors slid down the brown tape on top, and the cardboard flaps opened.

Inside the box was a fascinating contraption. The outside was a giant iron ring with a diameter as big as the father's arm span. Its inside was grooved, and through that channel slid another ring, about half that size, and through that ring, yet another ring, and so on and so on until the seventh ring, which was not much bigger than a silver dollar. The rings turned through one another at varying speeds, scraping out six different metallic pitches as they went.

The family watched for five or ten or thirty minutes while the seventh ring completed a full circle within the sixth, their feelings changing from elation at having received a gift to frustration at the thought that they could not establish what, exactly, the gift was. And then back to joy again at the prospect of solving such an excellent puzzle.

They hung the contraption on the old nail above the mantel.

It looks as if it measures something.

But what? they asked.

It seems like a clock to me.

What time is it then?

You know clocks aren't allowed anymore.

They were quiet for a moment, watching the rings turn.

At the rate they're moving I'd guess all the circles would be lined up at the top of the largest ring by sunset tonight.

What does that mean?

They looked at their hands.

I know. Let's find out what was happening the last time they were all lined up.

That must have been two thousand years ago at the rate that one's moving!

Two thousand years ago...

I'll google it.

The holographic screen jumped to life and the room was consumed by wind. The rustling of both the leaves on the ancient trees and the grass, warm from soaked-up sunlight, muffled the sound of tiny heartbeats in a unison that echoed through the core of the Earth.

The father pressed the off button. The computer turned dark.

They had forgotten.

Well, what about when they were all lined up on the bottom? That would have been a thousand years later...

The fire, death.

Almost... gone. All of us.

Mom, stop crying.

The four of them shifted around nervously. They could not forget.

So. It's peace and war.

Don't be ridiculous. Those things, you know they don't really exist. They just stand for things that happen. They can't be measured.

They left the rings on the wall anyway.

The sun rose and set, rose and set, but the family moved through the same eternal day as the heavenly bodies so close and far away.

For a while, they barely glanced at the rings. Then, the daughter found herself deciding to stay home rather than go to the movies with her friends when the sixth one was nearing the bottom of the fifth. The father went to work only when the seventh was at the bottom of the sixth. When the mother glanced at the rings and a familiar warmness came into her heart, she prepared a turkey, and when the relatives knocked on the door, they ate it. As the second ring lowered more and more each day, the family pushed their breaths down into the hollow spaces in their lungs and began hugging each other more often.

They never knew when it was six-thirty and time to get up or twelve-fifteen and time for lunch or ten o'clock and time for bed, but that was okay because they never wondered either.

Something had to be truth.