Machine – Caroline Shepherd

053 urlAnother brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS writer.

Once upon a time there was a man with six children. They were very hungry children, and his wife was even hungrier as she gave most of her food to them, because the pain of hunger in her stomach was nowhere near the pain of hearing her little ones try to be brave about having no more bread in the house.

The man worked as hard as he could as a blacksmith to feed his family, but all he ever did was earn enough to barely keep them alive, week to week.

In between working he thought and thought about how to make their situation improve, so that they could eat meat every day instead of just on Sundays, and all have a new pair of shoes every year, and maybe even take a family trip to the beachside at summertime, because his children had never seen the sea, but he had seen the sea, and it was beautiful, and he would love to give that to them.

In October a circus came to town, and his children were very excited, and every day would run down to the circus tent just to be near the thrill of it, to hear the growl of the lions and the gasps of the crowd, although of course they could not buy a ticket to go inside

The whole town was talking about the strange, or strong, or beautiful circus performers, and their exotic animal accomplices.

The man’s children would come home after these days, their eyes shining with what they had heard or glimpsed or imagined. “Papa, have you ever heard an elephant? It is like the loudest steam train in the world!”. “Papa, they say there is a lady who can walk on a wire in the air, like magic!”, “Papa, there is a man who can lift a tonne with his bare hands!”

It was early one of these October mornings when the man was in his forge, with his hammer, bent over a frame of red hot metal bars and two wheels with dozens of spokes in them, wiping the sweat from his brow. He was secretly working on his invention, about which he had not told anyone, least of all his hungry family.

He had been trying and trying to perfect his machine’s function, so that he might become rich and smell the sea air, but it was confounding him. He needed to work on the milling part of the machine, whilst also turning both wheels, and he simply couldn’t do all tasks at once.

As he gently, finely twisted the hot metal, he heard a strange noise outside his forge, around the back, where the woodpile was.

He kept the hammer in his hand and went outside. He stood looking at the woodpile for a moment, then leaned in closer, and was astonished to see two versions of exactly the same girl’s face, about 14 or 15 years in age, looking up at him from behind the pile of logs. They had fine features and long limbs and brown eyes.

He was too surprised to say anything.

“Please! Please sir! Don’t tell them we’re here!” whispered the girl with the larger hair.

The man found his voice: “Er, pray tell, who?” he asked.

“The ringmaster, sir!” hissed the girl. “Oh please sir, just turn away, I beg of you.”

The man stood there still: “Ringmaster? From the circus?

“Of course sir! You do not recognise us? We’re the air-flying acrobatic twins. Oh sir, please have mercy and do not tell him! For he is trying to make us GET MARRIED to his grown sons. So we have made our escape, for to find another circus.”

“And you ran away because of that?” asked the man.

Finally the other girl spoke, quietly, coldly: “Yes, because of that.” She stared at him.

The man heard shouting in the distance, and without thinking he piled up some more logs in front of the girls, then turned around and pretended to be examining his hammer in the sunlight while a crowd of policemen trotted past on horses, craning their heads this way and that.

And as he stood there, looking down at the hammer, the sun hit the metal and pierced his eye, and a little idea began to form in his mind. He held the hammer and squinted at the gleam of light and let the idea form itself, until finally the clip clop of hooves and the shouts of the officers died off in the distance.

Softly he said to the air, “And what will you do instead?”

“I don’t know,” answered one voice.

“We’ll land on our own feet,” said the other.

“Yes – it’s your feet what interest me,” said the man. “Give me one week. Then I will pay you eight coins, you will be free to go, and I won’t say a word to any police sergeant.”

Over the next seven days, light would crack into the forge in the early morning as the man opened the door with a hidden bowl of porridge, and the girls, sleeping together under a grey blanket on the pile of hay on the floor, would rise from their slumber.

They would work into the day, each girl rotating one wheel each, which turned the mill, on which the man tinkered and hammered.

Each evening the man brought the girls some bread and a little vegetable stew, and locked them inside the forge again, for their own protection.

On the seventh day the girl with smaller hair said, “Wait, if you please.” said. “Our week is up. Where are these coins you have promised?”

“Indeed,” said the man. “You have been excellent assistants, and my machine is ready to be revealed. I will pay you your coins on the morrow.”

Then he bolted the door of the forge and walked the path to his home. The moon was out and the evening was crisp. His humming heart was fairly bursting with the thrill of finally seeing his machine in working order.

After so many months of keeping his invention secret, he could now confess all to his wife. She would be surprised, but proud. And he would take his machine to a factory, and have hundreds of copies made, and his whole family would eat chicken every day and go to church in a carriage with four horses.

But now he was here, now it was all within reach, it wasn’t enough. His mind continued to race, and it raced back to the gloomy forge he had just left, and the two girls in it.

They were industrious, not lazy, their waists were slender, and their hair was thick and healthy. The one with the smaller hair was quietly spoken, and he thought about his eldest son, who was needing a wife, and there were none as fair or demure in the village.

All the man had to do was invite the girl inside the house, whilst he alerted the sergeant to the other girl, the one with the big hair and the scowl, then he would be rid of the one whilst keeping the other, and never need to pay those eight coins, which he didn’t have anyway.

His heart was really pounding now as he considered his plan. As he came closer to his house, his plan became set, and when he climbed into bed beside his wife, he almost was too excited to sleep.

But sleep he did, deeply and smugly, full of the satisfaction of all he would soon have.

Sometime just before dawn, however, a noise entered his dreams. It had been going for a while, a repeated high-pitched sound, and finally his conscious self swam out of the depths of sleep and he sat up in bed.

There was the noise again, coming from outdoors – chink, chink, chink, chink.

He went into the kitchen, put on his coat and his boots and stepped outside. The sky was quite light now and he could see the path clearly. The sound was coming from the forge and he quickened his pace.

As he came up to the forge, he hissed, “What are ye doing in there?”. There was a shuffling in response, the girls murmuring.

“What the devil…?” snapped the man. He slid back the bolt and opened the door a crack but couldn’t see anything in the gloom. He opened the door and, as he let it swing wide and his arm fell down, something came rushing at him out of the forge.

It was the twin girls, one directly behind the other, but somehow they were sitting down, and yet at the same time being propelled forwards in a rush of skirts and feet.

His eyes widened and his mouth started to open, but nothing came out.

It was his machine, his treasured machine, but it was not his machine. The wheels were still there, and the frame, but the mill had been removed, and somehow these girls were sitting astride it, one after the other, pedalling furiously, a bar fixed to the front for steering.

They flew past him and away, away down the path, to the road. He shouted, and forced his feet to run, run after them, but they were like a bird with wings soaring out ahead of him.

And he could do nothing, not even shout, as watched them, and it, his machine, grow smaller and smaller, then disappear, off to the east, in the direction of the seaside.

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