source: mantle clock, brass key· ~42 db· duration: a dozen quarter-turns
a regular krrek · krrek · krrek, slower than a heart, each one a half-turn of the brass key. between turns: a small mechanical sigh, a tooth slipping back into a tooth. the spring inside is being persuaded, not coerced. you can hear the resistance grow by the seventh turn; by the tenth, the key wants to push back. the winder knows when to stop without counting.
around it: the room very still, because winding the clock is a kind of evening rite. there is usually a chair. there is usually a smell of beeswax. somewhere the tick continues — it never stopped, the winding only feeds it forward — and in the pause after the last turn the tick seems briefly louder, as if grateful.
it stops at the limit of the spring. one final small tck — that is the key disengaging — and then the small instrument sits in the silence it has just bought. eight days, in this house. the building rests as much as the clock rests.