Text: an original contemporary feature-style practice extract.

The market clock had stopped at 11:17. Its two black hands looked decisive, as if the minute had been selected rather than stranded. I had come to write about neglected details in public places, but the hall below resisted that description: prices were rewritten in chalk, counters shone and a porter swept fragments of cabbage from the floor. Above this movement, the clock insisted on an old minute. It was wrong, but exact.

Near the entrance, a stallholder ended a telephone call by saying, “Meet me under eleven-seventeen.” She explained that regular customers used the stopped time as a location. A caretaker interrupted my attempt to call this a tradition. The clock was not being preserved, he said; it was waiting for repair, and the work would require the hall to close for a day. While he spoke, a child asked the time. His father glanced at a phone without looking at the clock.

At noon, six walkers assembled beneath the clock. None of them checked its face. Their arrival seemed to confirm the stallholder’s explanation until a visitor looked up, compared the clock with her watch and asked a stallholder, “Is it really eleven-seventeen?” The same fixed hands had gathered one group and confused someone outside it. The clock had failed as a clock and succeeded as an address, but only for people who already knew the language.