Excerpt || The Tailor of Time
Clockwork Phoenix, Norilana Books, Mike Allen ed., pub. 2008
Reprinted at Steampunk Workshop (in two parts)
Aurealis Award Best Young Adult Short Story 2008 shortlist
The Tailor Of Time sat at his sewing machine, stitching night to day.
He joined the clear cloth of dawn to a full bright afternoon like a circus top. Then he smoothed on a panel of smoky rouge for dusk and finished it off with a thick purple evening. Brushing his hand over the result, he felt a thin echo of satisfaction.
The Tailor worked with a minimum of noise or fuss. He suffered only the occasional grunt or shrug (to indicate 'this is done' or 'bring me cloth'), aimed at the tyros who also worked in his rooms. The tyros were pale, bald children that could pass as the Tailor's own. They looked like a ramshackle circus, dressed in scraps of cloth that tied at waist or shoulder. They worked at the Tailor's demand, darning or mending or gathering what needed to be darned, or mended, or gathered.
The Tailor ignored them. He existed in a meditative cocoon, his voice so unused it had all but healed over. His mouth sagged like a pocket, his eyes drooped like the shoulders of an old suit and his whole body slumped like a smock on a hanger.
Only his hands remained steady, darting leanly under the light of his sewing machine and out again before they could be caught by the quick, sharp tooth of the needle. In and out, swift as the very machine itself. In and out.
With the day laid out in cloth before him, the Tailor added a hem, threaded a drawstring through both ends and slung it like a cloak over a bare globe to his right.
Thus dressed, the globe was spun onto tracks like train tracks, where it butted against other globes and sloshed with the weight of water in its guts.
The water served to hold it steady.
Dismissed, the globe and its partners creaked and shuddered, working their way along the tracks circumventing the room. They passed the industrious tyros, the bare stone walls and heavy curtains of the room. They passed towards the arched window in one thick-cut wall, and would have passed out, but here they snagged and pushed back, bubbling against each other.
Coming through the window was a man.
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