^In the moment after adjusting the big mechanical timepieces came a quiet, like  when someone turns off the vacuum cleaner. The sounds of the clock would vanish and the stillness of the room could be heard. He set up a palliasse on the floor next to a window, where he would lie next to the sun slanting into the otherwise muted space, which brought into focus the details of the tower room, the striations of the wooden floor, now in a beam filled with dust that he would squint his eyes at to identify motes slowly descending, or sent aloft crazily into the invisible currents of the room. This brought him great peace.

^% 's (the clock worker’s) walk to work/morning before that, merging with and bringing below into view...

        The wall is^{[a][b][c][d][e][f]} situated near the center of town. It curves along a small stream that percolates along groves of trees that intermittently obscure the view of stained wooden tenements^[g] which overlook a darkened cobblestone lane of shops and restaurants.

        Tourists pass across this wall. They walk in the comfortable shade the wall provides, sometimes tracing their fingers on the white paint. A spot of sunlight suddenly illuminates their faces^[h][i]. Children jump to try to reach it.  A streak of beautiful days makes its appearance expected, and because of the city's grip on boundless construction, the spot's general location has survived for many decades, if not a hundred years or more.

/some distorted letters of the café’s window are projected onto the wall

created by the angles of reddish-tiled rooftops of merchant's charming houses, above the wooden beams of cobwebbed or converted attics, the sunniest rooms most prone to daydreaming, where //siblings lie comfortably on their stomachs reading.

Along the wall, sunlight scattered through green leaves onto the cool stones of the restaurant’s inviting patio, where it always felt like evening during the day. Places like this always reminded Milos of being on vacation, even though it was your mom he’d lived in since birth.

It was when the spot of light wasn't there, when it was overcast, that Milos felt ...well, it wasn't necessarily on account of the spot–it would be silly to think so–but if he was having a bad day lately, it seemed to coincide with the spot's absence. It wasn’t that all overcast days were bad, in fact, he relished them with a similar, but different flavored intensity as the brightest days, days capable of producing his spot of light. On these dimly lit mornings, the clouded sky spread over the town like a grey-flannel blanket and made the small purple flowers stand out along the path near the river, shimmering every so often in the cool breeze.

Some days the contrasts were almost too beautiful—sparrows against the sky, then perched amidst forsythia lit up in the evening sun. Seeing two similar colors almost blending into one another became its own particular comfort. His slate-grey sweater was somehow cozier nestled inside a cloudy day, the way a pipe, the tobacco, matches the amber lighting of a den, whiskey.

On his walk to work, Milos noticed his spot of light dissected by thick bars of black. It was a clear and cloudless day, shadows everywhere. Temporary scaffolding appeared next to the church steeple, probably to fix the side of the clock that was suspended at noon. As a boy, Milos had been inside the clock room, beneath the spire. The clock worker, demonstrating his trade to watchful students, would set one clock face, then rush over to the other side of the room to set another. This inevitably would lead to the long minute hand of each face, under careful inspection, to display a slightly different position on each dial, though the clock worker would insist that they were all precisely in sync^[j][k][l].^{[m][n][o][p][q][r][s][t][u][v][w][x][y][z][aa][ab][ac]}

Seen from the ground, workers wearing hard hats moved on the batten with a filmic quality, their silhouettes moving with a deliberate gentleness against the blue sky. A worker placed his hand on the beam, laughing. He picked up a lunchpail and the workers left the scaffolding. Sunlight touched the beam, where his hand had been^{[ad][ae][af][ag][ah]}, and warmed it ever so slightly.