A five-year-old boy decides to make a clock for his school project, but what he decides to do with it and the memories it evokes stir a town into action and gets the attention of his distant mother. What does time mean to a five year old? Is it a dream? Or a fragment of a memory? Does it stop or continue or can we control it? When Jackson makes a clock for his kindergarten assignment and places it above a railroad track, he is trying to control time. He hopes that his clock will show the correct hour, making the trains run without delay, and then possibly bringing his father back. Instead, mass transit stops, mistaking his clock project for a bomb, a terrorist threat. When a stranger in a scary bomb squad uniform asks him for the clock, he learns that it is the caring mother he wants and knows.