The Uncounted Hour

In a valley where nothing is begun until the Almanac says so, nobody has lived in an afternoon for four hundred years. They borrow hours they cannot pay for. The debt is entered against their names. They call it getting ahead. A boy who mends water clocks - the one trade in the valley that cannot be hurried - is seventeen when he is shown what his father owed, and told that it is now his. Four years, one month, eleven days. He can spend the next twenty-three years working it off. Or he can walk out past the terraces, across the salt, and look for the hour that was never written into the book. He goes. What waits on the other side of the desert is not what he was promised, and not what he was owed, and it takes him seven years and everything he has to understand what it is.A fable about the oldest habit there is - the belief that your life begins once the next thing is finished.