This short story was written for the Penprints Flash Fiction Dash 2019, and in (slightly magical) honor of the men and women who fought and died for freedom in World War II.
To see the prompt I was given that inspired this story, click here.
War
2006
“There once was a man who breathed new life to the inner workings of clocks but threw away their faces.”
Her lantern lit up the oaks along the road in a bluish hue.
“He loved to see their tick become a pulse and their windings a soul.”
Essen smoothed at the wrinkles in her blouse with the hand clenched over a dirty front page of yesterday’s newspaper. She’d lost her suit jacket last week, but she still had the leather briefcase slung over her shoulder. That was all that mattered.
“But since he hated the cold stare of their perfect faces, he left them all open to their gears…” Essen saw the outline of a roof through the trees. “Until he learned he could join them all together—trade all his magic—to give one of them imperfect expression.”
Home. She had made it home.
Essen slowly took hold of the briefcase’s handle, slipping its longer strap off her shoulder. She handled it as carefully as if it contained her soul.
In a way, it did.
1946
Essen watched him wheel his chair from one end of the room to the other. Springs and small gears crunched under the treads. Discarded. Lifeless. Their fractions of magic had all been a part of her for two weeks now.
“You know why you’re alive,” he said.
“Yes.”
His hand paused, one finger curled around the handle of his desk drawer. His back was lean and straight and somehow she knew that meant he was young. She also knew that the scars started at his hips and went down to his calves, and that sometimes his shoulders curled inward as if the pins he no longer wore on his chest were a weight that could never be closed up in a polished box.
He withdrew a letter from the drawer. “Please.”
Essen’s gaze dipped to the unnatural thinness of his legs. She’d heard people outside call him Hero, but by candlelight he called himself Cripple.
“I’ll find her even if I have to cross every ocean.”
He smiled for the first time since she had been born.
1948
Europe seemed colder than America to Essen. Mud from the small alleyways clung to her shoes.
She kept repeating the foreign name, as she had been for two years, but now fingers pointed her onward.
Essen found the door.
She stepped in.
She thought she felt Hero’s heart skip thousands of miles away. Or maybe it was a hitch in her own oiled pulse. She said the name again, holding out the letter. The woman behind the counter put her hand to her mouth.
“To the mother of the boy I killed,” Essen said.
The woman took the letter and tore it open, reading it aloud, and Essen learned that sometimes heroes couldn’t save everyone.
Hero had been shipped to France with his infantry division to fight in the European Theatre. Hero had found a boy and tried to hide him in his rank, but they had been separated under mortar fire.
The boy had been found.
The boy had been taken.
The boy had been burned.
And just because his name had been Jew.
The next day Essen left the woman’s house with a leather briefcase in hand. She didn’t make it far. Steps ran up behind her. She turned and saw the face of a young man in rage and pain.
A blow to the side of her head made her crumple to the concrete. Essen felt everything in her metal skull leak out in sparks. One by one her memories fizzled and unwound. She was the gears of a thousand living clocks, and they’d all been rattled loose.
She only remembered one thing. The briefcase had to get to a man called both Hero and Cripple.
But she didn’t know where he was.
2006
Essen went into the house. Yesterday’s newspaper fell from her lax fist. It drifted down to floorboards bare of springs and gears. A single clock hung on the wall. It ticked without a soul.
She heard the creak of his chair. He came in through the back door, and their eyes met.
“Essen?” he said. “I thought I’d dreamed you. Dreamed them all…” He lifted a hand as if to reach toward her, then let it fall back to his chair. “Where were you?”
“Everywhere,” she said. “But I finally fixed myself. I remembered. I brought you her reply.”
His eyes went wide in a wrinkled face framed by grey hair and tendrils of ghosts that should have been put to rest decades ago.
She lifted the leather briefcase, well-worn and stained with oil and blood and ink and gunpowder.
Tires crunched on the gravel road outside. Essen glanced back through the door. Headlights. A flash of the symbol on the Jeep’s door. They had followed her.
Hero stared at the crumpled newspaper page lying near her feet. “What did you do?” he whispered.
She carefully set the briefcase on his lap. “I had to get home.”
“They know.”
“They decided I must have sprung to life from a German experiment and am still operating on orders to eliminate a certain hero.”
“No one remembers me as a hero anymore, Essen. They just see a man in a chair.”
“Then look inside that briefcase.”
Jeep doors slammed. She’d caused too much trouble on her way here for them to let her live. They had probably brought a sniper.
Essen knelt beside Hero’s chair. The mechanical pulse that thrummed from her chest matched the beat of his.
“There was once a man who breathed new life to the inner workings of clocks but threw away their faces.”
She reached into the briefcase and pulled out a watch that had stopped moving in 1945. Its right side had been ruined by a 9mm round from a German Luger, but its left side looked whole.
“He loved to see their tick become a pulse and their windings a soul.”
On the back of the watch was the last part of Hero’s name, engraved and undamaged. Below it was a faint scratching of the boy’s name, made by a nail or a point of barbed wire. Essen placed it in Hero’s hand along with a fifty-eight-year-old letter.
“Because all he ever did was trade everything he had to give life to others.”
It was time Hero’s soul was complete again. Essen exhaled the magic that had kept her gears turning and her face un-changing for sixty years.
She felt the impact of a bullet in her skull. Metal crunched. Her inhuman body toppled over.
To them, the threat would be eliminated, an old hero saved.
They wouldn’t see the magic that had always been inside of him.
They had forgotten.
What did you think? Let me know!
Just B. Jordan is an award-winning author of fantasy and sci-fi. She graduated high school a year early and received her first publishing contract at the age of 18. To Ashes We Run is her most recent novel. Find it here.
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