The Demon Lover (2002)

David Arnason's 2002 collection of comic, self-aware fictions includes "Drowned Lovers", in which a narrator toys with tipping a young city couple's canoe into a Manitoba lake and keeps revising what happens next. A birthday watch runs through every version. (Open Library)

Watches

Victorinox Swiss Army (unidentified model): In the story "Drowned Lovers", Jake paddles at the back of the canoe planning to buy Sonia a Swiss Army watch for her birthday, because the gold graduation watch from her father has no numbers and she is always late. In one telling he realizes she is late because she wants to be and needs no such watch; in the telling the narrator settles on, he buys it for her anyway and she is still five minutes late. The text says only "Swiss Army watch".

Source text: Jake was thinking about how he was going to buy Sonia a Swiss Army watch for her birthday, so that she could read the dial and tell what time it was. The watch she wore was a gift from her dad when she graduated from high school, and it was gold, but it didn't have any numbers on it, and Sonia was always getting the time wrong. (David Arnason, "Drowned Lovers", in The Demon Lover, scan cataloged as Turnstone Press, 2002, p. 26; the purchase is on pp. 28 to 29; Internet Archive scan OCR)