Tempo of Thought

The city rented the rhinoceros’s thoughts and used them as its official clock. Every idea had to arrive on time: doubt at eight, solutions at nine, silence at ten. A supervisor rode on his back, tapping his head whenever a thought wandered. One Tuesday, the rhinoceros missed a beat.

For exactly one minute every clock stopped. Workers looked up from their desks, a child finished a question, and the supervisor heard himself think, ‘I am tired.’ Nobody knew how to report such an event. The rhinoceros missed another beat on purpose.

Soon the city kept one unscheduled minute each day. People called it a malfunction; privately, they lived for it. And the rhinoceros learned that a mind was not late simply because it travelled somewhere unexpected.