Ticktock

The son bent bushy eyebrows in an icy glance; Old Cornelius looked away — at the floor, into the fire, up at the clock ticktocking on the mantel, the clock which was Phebe Hand’s reserve magazine in the family’s ceaseless battle with want; most of the money stowed behind the swaying pendulum now came from Corneel.

As the clock ticktocks away the last few hours and minutes of the year, we look toward a new year filled with hopes of better things to come.

A Gustavian clock ticktocked on the carved marble mantelpiece.

A few days ago, the Washington Post published a long, depressing ticktock of the Trump administration’s execrable attempts to control the coronavirus and “reopen” the country for business, beginning with a shocking but not exactly surprising anecdote about how the president’s economic advisers had abetted the president’s most destructive impulses.