Chapter 2- "The Unmarked Hour"

The first signs don't shout. They wait. And they repeat.

The call came at 6:47 a.m. - an odd hour for discovery, but not for death.
Detective Elijah Brandt was already dressed, already caffeinated, already tired of the quiet.

Ashbrook had been still for weeks - too still. Quiet towns didn’t stay quiet. They just waited.

Marcus LeClair had said only one word on the phone: “Off.”
Vague. Instinctive. He never explained unless pressed - and Brandt had learned not to press. Marcus’s gut was rarely wrong.

This time, it led them to a neat little house on the edge of Waller’s View, where silence clung like condensation - thin, cold, unsettling.

-

The body sat in a patio chair, facing an old, moss-ringed birdbath.
Mid-forties. Male. Dressed for a day he never got to live.
No signs of struggle. No forced entry. No mess. Just… stillness.
Hands resting calmly on the chair’s arms. One eye slightly open, caught mid-thought.

Marcus stopped cold.
“The wrist,” he said.

Brandt followed his gaze. The carving was precise, sitting just above the radial bone. A clock. Round. Clean. Surgical.
No blood. No torn flesh. No bruising.
Just skin parted like paper - fresh, but quiet.

Brandt crouched. “No minute hand,” he murmured. “Just the hour. Six.”

Marcus didn’t answer. His stare tightened.

The medical examiner scribbled notes without looking up. “No obvious trauma. No defense wounds. COD undetermined for now.”

“Like he just… stopped,” Brandt said.

Marcus rubbed his jaw like he was trying to wake it up. “Maybe he did.”

Brandt looked past the fence. Immaculate lawn. Porch swept. Wind chimes still. The kind of place nothing strange should happen.
But the silence here wasn’t absence. It was presence.

-

Back at the station, Brandt stood before the whiteboard: one name scrawled across it. Bryce Denton.
Engineer. Divorced. Quiet. No known enemies. No active medications. No family in-state.

Marcus dropped into his chair and scrolled through Denton’s phone records like they owed him something.
“I don’t like things without motive.”

“I don’t like clocks without hands,” Brandt said, eyes still on the photo of the body. “Feels like the start of something.”

“What, a message?” Marcus asked.

Brandt tilted his head. “Or a countdown.”

-

That night, Marcus couldn’t sleep.
He fell into rabbit holes - TikTok clips of ranting women with carved wrists, deep-dive Reddit threads about sleeper experiments, a decade-old YouTube clip of another victim: same carving, different state.
He didn’t tell Brandt. Not yet.

Meanwhile, Brandt lay in bed, staring at the ceiling. The fan spun in lazy circles.
Something about the case stuck like a splinter. Not the clock. Not the lack of struggle.
The calm.

The body looked… at peace. Not taken, but surrendered.

At exactly 6:00 a.m., his eyes snapped open.
He could have sworn he heard ticking in the walls.

Reviews

[JayG]

First. Always use the word processor’s top ruler to create the indent. Leading tabs and spaces are often trimmed out by the HTML display software in websites.

So...you write well...far better than most. But you’re not writing fiction, and you’re WAY too focused on gimmicks:

1. Chapter 1: No one will read a script in order to get to the actual story...especially when they don’t know there will be one. People read fiction to be entertained, and what’s entertaining about: [Cut to grainy clips of crime scenes, flickering clocks, and headlines.]

2. Tick: When you read this story, you ACT out the tick, giving it seeming importance. But to the reader? It’s just a gimmick, and after a time or two, annoying.

Why do I say you’re not writing fiction? Because you’re transcribing yourself storytelling, and that works exactly as it should...for you. For the reader? You’ve given them a storyteller’s script with no performance notes or rehearsal time. But, unless they perform exactly as you would as they read, it’s the text-to speech voice you’ll hear if you have the computer read this to you. And you should always do that, because it picks up a lot.

A perfect example of the problem is: “It was the carving that changed everything.”

Stated as it is, it distances the reader and places them with you, not on the scene as him. In his viewpoint, FIRST he would note: “the carving of a clock on...” And THEN, he would say/think/do in response, because he’s living the events and you’re only TELLING about it, secondhand. And that’s a report, not a story.

As a point worth noting, from the reader’s viewpoint: The wrist is small, so “carving” a clock with numbers would seem not to work. And without numbers it’s only a circle. But...a brand, burned into the wrist might work better, and be faster for the one doing it.

That aside, the difference between telling the reader and showing them is viewpoint. Telling uses the report-writing approach we were taught in school. It’s outside-in, and inherently dispassionate: Fact-based and author-centric—which is what you use here. It’s your storyteller’s performance that gives the words life, but, none of that performance makes it to the page. What writers call showing is placing the reader into the viewpoint of the protagonist in all respects, calibrating the reader’s reactions to those of the protagonist.

Why that matters is that the reader learns of everything that happens or is said FIRST, and will react to the situation before learning how the protagonist does. So, if done right, the reader will react as the protagonist is ABOUT to. And if that happens, the protagonist will seem to be taking directions from the reader, as-their-avatar.

Do that and the scene comes to life for the reader. So, it’s not a matter of personal pronouns. Given that it’s the narrator who uses them, there’s no difference between:

Jack walked to the garage to get his car.
And:
I walked to the garage to get my car.

In both cases, someone is talking ABOUT him doing the same boring thing. Why boring? Because nothing that matters to the plot happens. Would the story change, were the car parked on the street; were he to trot; were it someone else’s car? No. So who cares?

But...if we changed it to, “Sue? Take your time. I’ll get the car and meet you out front,” we present it in HIS viewpoint, and, make it a natural time-break without the author stepping on stage to still the scene-clock, and kill any momentum, and realism, the scene may have generated.

Make sense?

For what SHOULD happen with the “let me tell you a story” approach, take a look at the trailer for the film Stranger Than Fiction, on YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iqZD-oTE7U&t=20s

As I said, you write well. So you have the skill, the desire, and the story. Add the skills of the Commercial Fiction Writing profession to that and there you are. My personal suggestion is to begin with Dwight Swain’s, Techniques of the Selling Writer. It's the best I've found to date at imparting and clarifying the "nuts-and-bolts" issues of creating a scene that will sing to the reader.

https://dokumen.pub/techniques-of-the-selling-writer-0806111917.html

It’s an older book (circa 1962), but still, and by far, the best. So grab a copy and dig in.

You might also check a few of my articles, and YouTube videos. They’re meant as an overview of the various traps, gotchas, and misunderstandings that catch us all.

Sorry my news wasn’t better, but pretty much everyone gets caught in that same trap, so you have lots of company—including me when I turned to writing.

Jay Greenstein
Articles: https://jaygreenstein.wordpress.com/category/the-craft-of-writing/the-grumpy-old-writing-coach/
Videos: https://www.youtube.com/@jaygreenstein3334

- - - - - -

“Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader. Not the fact that it’s raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.”
~ E. L. Doctorow

“In sum, if you want to improve your chances of publication, keep your story visible on stage and yourself mum.”
~ Sol Stein

“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
~ Mark Twain