Bernard stared at the gear. Then he took out his red pen, uncapped it, and drew a small, perfect circle around a period on his newspaper. He handed the paper to Eugene.
At 2 PM, they returned home. But “home” was a euphemism. Arthur lived in a basement apartment with seventeen clocks, only one of which worked. Bernard lived in a house where every surface was covered in unopened mail. Eugene lived in a van down by the river, but he had arranged the interior like a Japanese tea house, complete with a tiny shelf for his Ziploc bag collection. old men gangbang
Their evening entertainment: phone calls. Bernard stared at the gear
On Saturday, they had a wildcard event. Last month, they tried to build a birdhouse. It collapsed. They laughed for the first time in years. Yesterday, they went to a casino. Bernard lost forty dollars and called it “tuition in human stupidity.” Arthur won twelve cents on a slot machine and kept the payout slip in his wallet. Eugene got lost in the parking garage for two hours and said it was the most interesting thing that had happened to him all year. At 2 PM, they returned home
That night, Eugene called Arthur’s phone. It went to voicemail. He left a message: “The grocery list I found today? It said ‘milk, eggs, bread, and revenge.’ Definitely a code.”
Arthur, a retired watchmaker, had fingers that trembled until they touched something small. He spent his weeks disassembling and reassembling a single, stubborn cuckoo clock. It had not told the correct time since 1987. He didn’t care. For him, the entertainment was the struggle—the tiny screws, the brass gears that slipped from his tweezers, the way the wooden bird sometimes lurched out mid-afternoon and screamed for no reason. That was a good day.
Three old men met every Tuesday in the back corner of the "Sunken Pearl," a diner that smelled of stale coffee and fried onions. They called themselves the Committee for Unnecessary Excellence.