The clockwork mouse

He remembered Edward small. He remembered a boy in a grey jersey, with his hair cut straight across, standing on this same pavement with his nose pressed flat against this same glass, looking at a clockwork mouse that went round and round on a tin plate. His mother had stood behind him holding his hand, and every so often she had said, “Edward, your nose,” and he had taken it off the glass for exactly as long as it took her to stop looking.

Jonah had been a young man then, new to the round, and he had stopped to watch the mouse too.

Now the boy was broad in the shoulder, like his father, and he had his father's broad hands. He set things down the way his mother had, in an orderly way, as though each one had a particular place waiting for it and would be glad to get there.

An original extract from The Lamplighter’s Round · about 1 minute to read.