The Mechanical Maiden
Sopping wet in his monastery rags, the aging botanist clung for life to the seat of his lifeboat. By miracle, it had survived the ravages of a violent storm, where trident-spurred waves had foamed forth and blazed their fevering water to his tiny vessel. When at last the ordeal had subsided, he soon found that he had floated onto gentler seas, where a thick smog of brightly-tinted fog nearly concealed him from the realization that land was at hand. Even with his nearsighted vision, he could glimpse the unfocused silhouette of an uninhabited island, just a short distance away. The old botanist reached into his pocket and pulled out a single tuning fork. To the wet wood he struck its metal and listened intently to its resonant note. When he heard that the wind blowing through the trees and the mountains was exactly the note he recognized from his fork, the botanist smiled in spite of his mounting isolation, for he knew he had arrived at his elusive destination.
When the botanist docked his tiny boat on this lonely beach, he instantly caught sight of a beautiful, broken sight just beyond the jagged rocks. Washed ashore on the blackened sands, he caught sight of a fair mechanical maiden lying awake, her eyes of glass staring glazed at the sky, birds passing her by, as those hollow pupils scanned from left to right, a steady rhythm in constant pace with the incessant ticking and tocking of her internal grandfather clock. She was an artificial being, broken from the torso down, her oxidizing cogs and corrugated gears revealing the phony maiden that she was.
“Fair maiden, why do you sit bare to rot in these seas all by your lonesome?” he asked the automata.
“Good sir, are you lost?”
“I am precisely where I have chosen to be. I came to this island, whose existence I had only theorized by listening to the stars at night, that there might be a place where I can study the beauty of trees and the music of flowers, unabated by the constant distractions and industrial obstructions of man’s creation.”
“Then I am sorry to intrude on your escape. It was not my intention to be here. I was created to live in a manor for the entertainment of important travellers.”
“Is there any way I can help you return to your place?”
“Do not worry about me, good sir. I am beyond repair. The artisanal hands that built me have long since died with the mighty vessel we sailed upon. Go on with your scientific journey, leave me here, as my clock is soon to stop anyhow.”
“I insist.”
“Very well,” said the lovely automata with a blank expression, “if you wish to assist, perhaps in your weakened state, from many days unfed no doubt, I wonder if you can help me reach those heights so high above me. There at the peak of that mountain above us where the clouds are low and the wind is weak, beneath the tree that lives all up alone, I would like to rest my mechanical breaths for the final time, right up there. If you can take me there, I promise there will be a prize most worthwhile to your scientific mind.”
The old botanist at first tried to lift and carry her as though she were a being of organ and tissue, but soon found that, despite her size, she was quite dense, all her many metallic parts inside making her weigh as much as a piano. So the botanist tore off the waffle-textured sleeves of his robe and fashioned them into a rope, which he then tied around his waist and attached to the woodgrain shoulders of her broken shell.
He marched up the treacherous, unmarked path that led to the mountain top. Slowly, he climbed, those aged legs using their diminished muscle mass to haul this dying machine up to her final resting place. As she was dragged through the mud and the rocks, she stared in dazed fascination at the birds and things that paraded her periphery.
“What marvellous things that surround my eyes,” she remarked.
“Ay,” said the botanist, struggling to pull her up the path, “many beautiful creations that surround us. So much rich vegetation, so rare to find, unless you are like myself, who decided to leave all the comforts of his cathedral home, to find the lush fragrance of the wilderness here to savor his soul unto God.”
Up the path, he set his sights on many blooming orchids and pollinated poppies, which he had only read about in ancient science tomes, crudely depicted in simplistic illustrations from bygone researchers. Now, as he saw them for himself, he could not believe what true beauty they beheld, and such sights made this arduous task of carrying the machine up the mountain much more bearable. Though she was a work of artifice, ultimately, he realized that this mechanical maiden was as much a part of the earth as the island she was dying upon. She too, was extracted from minerals of earth, built by hands of flesh, and now being carried by an aging man of God, who toiled beneath the sweltering sun and against the harshness of the elements to do as she requested. To pass the time, he would recount fascinating facts to this mechanical maiden, revealing the profound knowledge he held of the natural world and all its wondrous microscopic secrets.
When at last he arrived at the peak of the mountain, where a mighty and ancient oak lived in solemn quiet, he stood in reverent silence, for unexpectedly, it was deathly still up there above the clouds, free of the wind. Is this the peace one arrives at when they are close to their creator? When he turned back to face the mechanical maiden, he was astonished to see that her cogs and gears had stopped turning, and no amount of winding on the gear by her cracked porcelain neck would be able to revive that stopped clock of her broken heart. She had left this earthly realm, and in her wake, many bounteous plants had grown across her mask and through the surface of her plates. Flowers of colors he had never seen, of such stunning shape as he could never have imagined. It was a feast of life to this aging botanist's eyes. And just before he could crouch down and extract the seeds from these incredible discoveries, he realized that his clock too would no longer tick.