Wicked, Clockwork Heart

Wicked, Clockwork Heart: A Fairytale

Summer's heart was made of iron. 

Not metaphorical iron, but actual, honest-to-goodness metal. To Summer, time was a clock. And since her heart was very much like a clock, her heart was time. But to the boy, whose heart was meat, her heart was not iron, or a clock, or time. To the boy, Summer's heart was everything gold and beautiful and precious in the world. And since time has never been kind to meat, the townspeople said that the boy's soft, warm heart was bound to be shredded and bruised and cut to ribbons by Summer's cold clockwork heart.

But love has never lived in the heart. The truth is that love grows in the mind, getting bigger and feverish and pulsing with time. Summer's heart may have been iron, but her mind was meat. And what her mind wanted was the boy. His name was Noel and he had skin as pale as ice, and hair as black as night.

Summer and Noel were not supposed to fall in love. Summer was not supposed to fall in love with anyone. The townspeople said that when Summer's real heart died, her soul died with it. When Doctor Goode replaced her dead heart for a ticking one, she became something else. Something other. Summer's mother would jump whenever she heard the tick of her daughter's new heart, and her father, though still kind, would get a sad, faraway look in his eyes whenever Summer smiled up at him. And once, when she kissed him on the cheek, she saw him wipe it away when he thought she wasn't looking.

"You know what iron is for don't you?" said her mother one day, while they made bread. Summer watched as her mother folded and pressed and punched the dough.

"No, what is it for?" said Summer. "To fix people?"

Her mother stopped kneading and stared down at the dough enveloping her hands.

"Iron is a punishment. The princess wears iron shoes to look for her true love as penance. A king once used it as a mask to keep his power. Prisons make their bars from iron, and knights of old made iron spears to punish the evil."

"Do you think me evil?" said Summer.

"I don't think of you at all," said her mother. "You are not Summer."

"What am I then?"

"Something else," said her mother, punching the dough again. "Something wicked."

So it was decided that Summer would go live with Doctor Goode. And everyone sighed in relief as Summer rode away in the doctor's dark, horseless carriage. Everyone but Summer, who cried so much that she was afraid her iron heart would burst. Iron does not break as easily as human flesh, but Summer did not feel like iron. She felt like glass. She did not feel wicked. She felt cracked, broken, ready to shatter. She felt alone.

Doctor Goode was an inventor. When he was not tending to the sick, he was tinkering in his workshop. He always knew when Summer was feeling sad and would bring her presents. The first time, she sat upon a large stone and stared up at the birds. The doctor's house was a small cottage in the forest, outside of town. This suited Summer just fine. No one looked at her angrily in the forest, no one made the sign of the cross when she was minding her own business. No one called her soulless or wicked or followed her around making tick-tock noises as the young boys in the town often did. The doctor called her Summer, as he was supposed to. The birds didn't say anything, just sang their merry little songs. The squirrels chittered and the deer made chewing sounds as they munched fresh, green shoots of grass.

On that first day, Summer hid in the forest and cried. When she came back, she sat upon one of the large, smooth stones that made a circle in front of the doctor's little house. She looked up at the birds and wished she could fly away.