Little Thieves by Susan Gordon Byron

Dali’s clocks were sincere. They slipped over things, slid past and took nothing with them.

They changed. Or I changed them.

Pickpockets.

In the library, while I was staring into space – I had given myself up to laziness, swung in a hammock of not doing – a little gang of clocks slipped down a staircase of books and off the desk. They smothered my words and ran off with a deadline.

I declared Dickens boring. Shakespeare just impassable. With too many princes. I thought nasty things about the librarians, planned for a life without a degree.

I had got quite far into this new fiction when I saw them laughing in the courtyard. They’re not Dali’s clocks, I realised. They’re mine. And I gave chase.
 

Susan Gordon Byron is a non-fiction editor and podcaster in London. Her poetry has appeared in Dust and tiny wren lit. After a NCTJ postgraduate diploma in newspaper journalism, she worked at the Catholic Herald for two years. She hosts The Culture Boar Podcast.