The Narrative Repository

I've been busy today. I almost forgot to A. do a freewrite and B. post it. I'm very, very tired now.


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Magwyn climbed the stairs. The treads cracked like gunshots each time she put a foot down, wood and ice and cold all under the frozen sky. It was a stupid idea, whoever had decided that the middle of January was the best time to dismantle the tower’s indoor staircase. These outside ones were steep and dangerous in the middle of the summer, let alone when they were covered in sheer ice. If she were lucky, there would be enough bare tread, protected by the bulk of the tower, for her to put down the toe of her boot.

She reached the landing that marked the halfway point. Magwyn kept a hand anchored to the railing as she caught her breath. The land spread white and sparkling and soft before her. It was beautiful but deeply, deeply frozen. If it had been anywhere near the freezing point, all the snow and ice would have melted into shapelessness by now. As it was, the steady winter winds had carved fantastic sculptures through snow banks and bushes. Even the great waterfall, visible to the west, was solid, a vast, twisted hulk of ice dominating the landscape.

Shaking herself, Magwyn forced her legs to bend again and continue to the top. Soon she was scraping her feet against the bottom of the doorframe. She knocked twice on the door and let herself in. She unlaced her boots and left them beside the door. Magwyn fitted her feet into a pair of slippers. She draped her coat and mittens on the back of a nearby chair.

“Uncle Irving?” she said.

Magwyn looked around the room. A fireplace radiated heat to her right and a tiny kitchen to her left gave way to a living space cum workshop, taking up nearly the entire circumference of the tower. A drafting table overflowed with papers. A basket of smooth river rocks shared quarters with several dismembered umbrellas. Pieces of his prized fungus collection had fallen off the walls and were currently being batted about by a large white cat, who stepped neatly around what appeared to be about a half a bushel of walnuts. Clean, though wrinkled, laundry hung from the railings that lead to the inner stairs. Magwyn shook her head. She crossed the room and started pulling it down. She stubbed her toe on a large ump of ore that had been holding the laundry in place, and so she kicked it again out of pique.

“Uncle Irving, I’m not your maid,” she said. “Come on! You promised you’d have time today!”

A metallic clanging from above had Magwyn ducking out of instinct. A ladder with brass fittings descended from the ceiling, stiffly unfolding. The feet of the ladder slid into two grooves in the floor. Down came Irving, looking as rumpled as ever.

“My dear Magwyn,” he said. “Of course I have time for you!”

He pulled her into a hug, laundry and all.

“Put that down,” he said. “And come up to the loft with me. I have something interesting to show you.”

“It’s not something on the telescope, is it?” said Magwyn. “You had me looking in it all night, the last time I was here, and I couldn’t see right for a week!”

Nonetheless, she let Uncle Irving lead her up the ladder.

“But those meteor showers were extraordinary,” he said. “And besides, it’s daytime. Very hard to see the stars when our sun is in the way.”

They got to the top of the ladder into a second, smaller workspace. Baskets full of pieces of metal filled most of the space: gears, rods, plates, tubes, and wires all crowded around a desk. Something lumpy, covered by a piece of cloth, lay on the worktable. The sun, by way of a narrow skylight, sliced into the clutter and highlighted all the dust. Magwyn sneezed.

“Close you eyes and hold out your hands,” said Irving.
She rolled her eyes.

“Is all this necessary?” she said. “Can’t we just play a game of chess or something?”

Magwyn loathed chess.

“Just do it,” said her uncle. “I promise you’ll like it!”

She sighed and closed her eyes.

Something remarkably heavy landed in her hands, and she nearly dropped it. He could have warned her it was heavy, but no. Just like that time when she was six and he hadn’t warned her about the etching acids. Or when she was nine and he’d enlisted her help in finding and carrying a long-dead deer home. She’d smelled for a week.

“Tada,” he said. “Just wind the key in the back.”

Magwyn opened her eyes and sucked in a breath of air. It was a cat. A very real looking cat. She wound the key and, to her amazement, it opened its eyes and uncurled itself from its sitting position. She set it down on the floor and it began to walk around. He’d fashioned a clockwork cat. She could see into its gears as it walked around and waved its tail, then took off after a lone housefly. Copper and silver and brass and other metals she didn’t know all gleamed in its every movement.

“How did you do it?” she said. She couldn’t take her eyes off it.

“It wasn’t easy,” he said. “I had to make special alloys. But it’s not perfect. It needs to be wound every couple days. And it needs to stay warm.”

“Warm?” she said. “Wouldn’t it have been better to make it in the summer, then?”


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Vaguely middle-ages, yes. Magical, possibly. It's interesting to think about a mechanical cat, isn't it? Yes, there are simulated cats out there today, but that's all made possible with computer chips. It boggles my mind to think about non-computerized mechanical things. Ugh. All my sentences are becoming the same boring length.

~Later