What Time Takes

They say that time heals all wounds.

They’re wrong.

Llewelyn learned this at exactly 11:17 PM on Christmas Eve, right when the clock in her grandmother’s bakery started ticking backward.

Tick.

(Backward.)

Tick.

(Time doesn’t heal. Time takes.)

The snow started three hours ago. The drifts had already sealed every exit except the front door, and that too would be buried soon. Yet somehow the tracks out in front stayed fresh. These were small footprints, appearing one by one, leading directly to her door. No one had walked out there; she would have seen them.

Right?

Her first cup of cocoa sat untouched, steam rising in shapes that reminded her of reaching hands. Next to it, fresh-baked cookies sat cooling on the rack, each one decorated with faces that changed when she looked away. The ribbons she’d bought for wrapping presents splayed out, coiled on the counter like living things.

We measure our lives in moments. But what happens when those moments grow too long? What happens when the moment between one second and the next stretches just long enough for something else to slip its way through?

Her grandmother had tried to warn her. “Time moves differently in this place,” she’d said on her deathbed. “Especially on Christmas Eve. If you hear the bells, don’t answer. If they knock, don’t open. If they ask for their gifts — “

But she’d died before finishing that sentence — or perhaps she’d finished it in a time that hadn’t happened yet.

The bells rang.

Not the cheerful silver bells she’d hung on the door a few months ago, but deeper ones. Older ones. They rang out from somewhere under the floorboards, behind the walls, above the ceiling — all at once.

Frost crawl across the windows as she watched. They formed words in her grandmother’s unique handwriting:

They’re coming.

They’re hungry.

They’ve waited so long.

Time doesn’t heal, but it does keep score. It remembers unpaid debts, unkept promises, and undelivered gifts. How many children had come to this bakery on Christmas Eve, through all its years? How many had tasted her grandmother’s special recipes, the ones written in that strange, spidery handwriting at the back of her ancient cookbook?

How many had gone home?

The footprints reached her door now. Small shadows gathered outside. Their edges were too sharp; their movements were too fluid. They wore the shapes of children, but children don’t move like that. Don’t smile like that. Don’t press their too-long fingers against glass and leave frost-patterns that look like screaming faces.

The clock struck midnight, though it read 11:17.

Because time, you see, is not a river flowing forward. It’s a spiral, that endlessly circles, and sometimes, if you stand in just the right place, at just the right moment, you can see where the spiral ends. Or begins.

She had a choice to make.

A gift sat in her hands. Her grandmother had left it for this moment, for this night, for these visitors who were not children but wore childhood like borrowed clothes.

When she opened the door, the snow fell upward.

The townspeople found the bakery empty the next morning. Inside, they discovered cooling cookies arranged in perfect spirals, three cups of still-steaming cocoa, and wrapped presents addressed to names no one remembered.

Sometimes, on quiet nights, customers would say they could hear children laughing in the kitchen. But it’s not laughter, not really. It’s the sound of time unwinding, of debts being paid, of gifts finally being delivered.

And if you look closely at the baker’s smile, you might notice it’s the same one her grandmother wore. Exactly the same in every way. Down to every line, every crease, every shadow.

Time doesn’t heal.

Time takes.

And sometimes, time gives back, but never quite the same thing it took.