I’ve always been inspired by music (I know, super original!) and music has always been a part of my writing. Way back in the days of burnt CDs, my mates and I used to put together CD mixtapes and I came up with the idea of a series of short stories based around pieces of music. Mixtape is all short stories sharing their titles with different songs and inspired, to various degrees, by their lyrics, artists, and vibe.
Currently Playing: Blondie – Heart of Glass
Once upon a time, a brilliant young inventor built himself a clockwork wife. Capable of loving him in all the ways a living woman might. Capable, apparently, of a great many things.
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Once upon a time, there lived a brilliant young inventor who built the most extraordinary clockwork creations. Powered by springs and gears, his inventions seemed to take on a life of their own. Nobles and other rich folk would commission him to create one-of-a-kind wonders and entertainments for them.
One noble had him build a clockwork dog that barked and chased its own tail, to play with his children. Another a clockwork frog that leapt from lilypad to lilypad in a pond in his garden. For a wealthy merchant, he created an elaborate clockwork train set with little locomotives and carriages that ran around a set of copper tracks and tiny figures that appeared to board or depart the trains at different stations. He even built clockwork clocks, although they were always designed primarily to show off the intricacies and expense of their workings rather than as devices to tell the time. With each invention, he further perfected his techniques and learned how to apply them to ever more elaborate constructions.
His work made the young inventor a wealthy man but he had no one to share it with. It wasn’t that he was without romantic prospects, he was neither attractive nor unattractive but his brilliance drew a bevy of admirers. His wealth could also make some women ignore his personal eccentricities. But none of his potential partners met his exacting standards. The inventor lived his life with the same level of absolute precision he required from his creations. From waking up in the morning, bathing, breakfast, tinkering in his workshop, lunch, meeting with clients, working, dinner, social engagements, sleep, he lived his life like clockwork. The general untidiness of other people’s lives and minds repulsed him. Any sign of disordered thinking or ill discipline was enough to turn him away from a possible bride.
As years passed and his feelings of loneliness increased along with his skills, the inventor happened upon the solution. He would create a woman for himself, perfect and precise in every way. She would be his clockwork wife.
For months, the project consumed the young inventor. Her proportions he designed to be mathematically ideal. Her frame was made from copper polished to a high sheen. Her limbs and parts of her torso were plated with custom carved pieces of ivory filigreed with gold. It was expensive but his trade had earned him much and he’d had few diversions to spend it on until now. Some sections of her body he encased in curved glass to reveal the wonders of clockwork underneath. All of the clockwork he, of course, designed and built himself. A labyrinth of gears and pulleys and springs and levers that would allow the clockwork woman to walk and move and imitate life. In fact, he designed her to do all the same things that a living woman would be capable of doing. At least, all the same things that he required.
The clockwork woman’s face in particular was a masterpiece. He designed and molded it himself out of pure silver, with a working mouth and eyes of coloured glass. When complete, the clockwork woman had a captivating and timeless beauty frozen on her features.
To guide the clockwork woman’s elaborate system of pulleys and gears, the inventor required a very special heart. He agonised over how to create it to his own exacting standards. At first, he tried to give her a heart of gold but the metal was far too heavy and far too malleable for his purposes. Other metals he normally worked with lacked the precision needed for this task. He ended up giving his clockwork bride a heart of glass. Brittle, fragile, but extremely precise. He inscribed his name on every individual piece as he fabricated and assembled the central organ.
On the fateful day that the young inventor completed his clockwork bride, he plunged an enormous brass key into the centre of her chest. He turned it, and turned it, and turned it. As soon as the key was removed, a gentle ticking started in the clockwork woman’s chest. The teeth of tiny glass gears meshing together. The clicking sounds rapidly spread through her entire artificial body. Her limbs began to shift and move. Her glass eyes fixed on her inventor’s face and a smile crossed her silver face. She said nothing, the inventor had seen no reason to give her a voice.
At first, his clockwork wife slotted into the inventor’s life perfectly. As she’d been designed to do. She woke him in the mornings, she served him his breakfast and other meals. She assisted him with menial tasks in the workshop and waited on him when he met with clients. In the evenings, she performed her wifely duties.
In time, however, the inventor began to grow weary of the clockwork woman. Every day unfolded with unerring sameness. While the inventor had always prided himself on his self-discipline, his clockwork wife’s unearthly precision made him feel clumsy and stupid. He had made her perfect and beautiful as a testament to his own skills but clients became so fascinated by her, like she was an individual independent of him, that they forgot he was in the room. And while she serviced him in every way a living woman might, the grip of her hands, her mouth, and her gilded womanhood was cold and hard. And she could only ever perform her duties with the same absolute efficiency. Lying awake at night, listening to the constant ticking of her body as she lay sleepless beside him, his resentment festered.
Prideful as he was, the inventor refused to simply admit he’d made a mistake. He couldn’t bring himself to dismantle her. He couldn’t sell her, certainly not for any less than the small fortune he’d spent in creating her.
The inventor might have carried on unhappily in this state of strange matrimony but then he met another woman. A living woman, a schoolmistress. He couldn’t say what drew him to her initially. Compared to the clockwork woman’s otherworldly beauty, she was quite plain. According to her reputation though, she lived her life almost as precisely as he did. Almost, but his taste of true precision had mellowed his demands for the same in a potential partner.
Without taking his clockwork wife into consideration, the inventor began to court the schoolmistress. Their relationship soon became serious, with an eye toward marriage. He had never legally married the clockwork woman of course so that was no kind of barricade. The clockwork woman simply haunted his home, still used for menial tasks in his workshop or as something to impress potential clients. On the night the inventor and the schoolmistress consummated their relationship, she watched from the doorway with eyes of coloured glass. A tiny, muffled crack came from within the chassis of her ticking chest.
When the bodies were discovered, one of the two was barely recognisable as human. A red and twisted thing. Eventually, investigators confirmed this was the schoolmistress and determined that she had been flayed. Her skin had been removed in a single piece with surgical precision. The clockwork woman was gone. Detectives came to believe that she’d stolen the skin in order to disguise herself as a living woman. She’d also taken the woman’s eyes, her voicebox, and her womb.
The other corpse, that of the young inventor, was mostly intact. He had been killed with a single, precise blow that caved in his windpipe. After the fact, his chest had been pried open, ribs snapped, and his heart removed. In its place was a fistful of broken glass.
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Sean: Honest to God, I just realised as I finished my final read-through of this piece that Heart of Glass was playing on my Spotify! I wasn’t even listening to the Mixtape #2 playlist, I’d had it playing initially off a “chilled classics” playlist and it had just been rolling along on its own. I hope that’s an approving sign from the universe.
Heart of Glass was one of the first titles / ideas I jotted down for Mixtape when I was brainstorming ideas. Same central idea, some kind of automaton with a heart of glass, some kind of clockpunk setting. It took me a long time to find the hook though, the fairy tale framing, and then the ending.
From time to time, I feel like a theme unintentionally emerges depending on the order I’ve decided to publish certain stories on the website. Because the order I release stories in isn’t necessarily the order they were written, I do try to mix up genres a little bit even if it’s been really heavy on horror lately. But looking at this one in the context of the last few releases, I swear it looks like I’ve just discovered misogyny and decided someone should be writing about it. I just picture the brainstorming jotted down in my notebook:
Men fear women will laugh at them, women fear… etc. etc.
And now: Women as objects – bad??
Actually this one probably crosses over a bit thematically with Polyester Girl, doesn’t it? I hope it’s distinct enough. Honestly, I thought of Heart of Glass more in line with another theme I’ve visited a couple of times which is SEX ROBOTS ARE NOT TO BE TRUSTED as in One Piece at a Time and Coin-Operated Boy. That’s it, that’s the actual theme.
Next Track: alt-J – Left Hand Free
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