Bedtime - A Short Story Anthology

The Bear and the Cogwheel Toys

The Bear and the Cogwheel Toys

By Elisabeth_Long

"Oy, Bear!"

The Captain's toots come from the worktable far below my shelf.

"The little girl is here!"

Beneath the Cogwheel's Toy Shop & Repair, Estd 1870 in the window appears a pair of goggles, pressing against the glass. The bright green eyes behind the lenses sweep the upper shelves. The smile that lights the child's face when she spots me is like the sunrise I haven't seen in a very long time.

Not since even before I was wedged between storage boxes here and forgotten.

'Yes, I see her.'

The gears, cogs, and vents of the toys sound like whirs, toots, and hisses to humans. But to other toys, they're real words.

And though I'm soundless, the others hear me. All woken toys whether new or old can hear each other speak.

An ancient teddy bear, I don't have all the fancy mechanisms the others do. I can't make sounds, nor can I move. All I have is a broken pocket watch stitched onto a frayed waistcoat, the ties of which are crumbling, the pocket watch slipping ever looser as time passes.

"She's early today," the Captain reports.

Captain Winnifred, as her child named her, has been at the shop for four days. The toy soldier was wounded in the line of duty protecting her child, she told us, chasing a rat away from her child's bed in the night. The compass on her copper helmet came loose. Her retractable, spinning sword snapped in two. Jedediah Cogwheel, the shopkeeper, replaced it with a brand new one with a winch hilt. He also stitched a tear in her military brocade jacket. Winnie was going home tomorrow.

The little girl turns to the woman beside her. Her mother I'm sure. They share the same shaped face and brown curly hair. They wait together at the coach stop in front of the shop. The woman is wearing a striped tailcoat vest and skirt. A large circlet of keys dangle from her leather waist cincher.

Phineas the Waterdancing Catfish thinks she works at the seaside inn. He'd been there with his child on vacation. Phin says all the staff wear similar uniforms.

Phin is getting his metallic tail fixed. The gears that make it swing side to side got rusty when his child accidentally dropped him in the sea. Jedediah is giving Phin special glass gears that won't rust. He's also getting his brass gills and whiskers oiled and his telescopic monocle cleaned.

The girl carries her usual satchel. Is she being taken to school before her mother heads off to work?

My long ago child's mother accompanied him to school and he'd bring me along. We travelled by horse and carriage then.

He'd sit me beside him. But as time passed and he grew older, he'd ignore me and I'd often flop over or fall to the carriage floor. One day I fell hard and my watch broke. The boy never noticed. He just left me there.

A servant found me. And not long after, I was packed into a box along with old clothes and blankets that belonged to my child when he was a baby. The lid closed above me...

I don't like to remember how quiet and dark it was.

I was there for a very long time.

The day the box shook and I heard voices again, the lid opened and there was Jedediah. He scooped me out, muttering something about wasting good coin at an antique auction, of my being too old, not even good for spare parts. He then shoved me up here where I've been ever since, meeting and greeting all the toys over the years that come in for repairs. Their stories make me happy but also make me sad.