👨🏾💻"Ashwin's enquiries into the geological anomalies of the sites have not endeared him to the multi-national higher-ups, who are more interested in milking the land for valuable minerals to line their own pockets."🇮🇳
🌏His world will never be...
Kairos the horologist pottered away behind shuttered windows, away from prying eyes.
The outside world would never understand is his time-consuming hobbies.
Not many could stomach his rather unusual time-pieces.
With time to kill, Kairos slunk into the copse that shaded his studio.
Like a vice, a memory wound round his middle-aged head. "Kai," slurred his mother's voice from the past " a shhrrprise for yer! " her red talons tugging the straggly black locks of his younger self. Kairos remembered the contempt in her crow-lined eyes.
Blonde big sister had flown the nest, leaving her raven-haired brother Kairos with their inebriate mother.
On his thirteenth birthday - at his father's death-bed, mother timed her revelation to kill their spirits: her son was a cuckoo and her husband was a cuckold!
And she gave him a special present - to aim at a better life, she cackled.
Kairos ruffled his grey beard to dust off that foul memory.
Time now to stuff an unhappy past using his thirteenth-birthday present!
A shaft of sunset bled the woods in maple light
Kairos focussed his lens.
Flutterings in the foliage.
Now time for a different shot: clawing back the birthday catapult, releasing the deadly present, then wresting his kill from a weeping willow.
Back in his studio Kairos was blind to everything but his taxidermy.
He perched the stuffed cuckoo in the clock-face, just in time for his new customer.
With his beaky nose he sniffed to check that glue was the only odour.
His customer wanted a unique cuckoo clock for her daughter.
She would be dead right, Kairos chuckled - thanks to what lay beneath the veneer.
This mummy's present to a 'dearest daughter' on her 21st birthday was sure to be a timeless classic, sneered Kairos to himself.
Kairos perched on his window seat, reading a battered copy of The Blind Watchmaker; content with the present he had designed in an unpredictable universe.
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