Metal Dreams

Brain Child

I remember it like it was yesterday. The year was 2012, and I was 9 years old. It was sweltering July, just on the cusp of crawling into summer's cocoon and emerging as humid August, soon to bring September's cool afternoons. I was sitting on the floor of my dad's workshop, a nut or bolt cold under my grubby knee. I was fiddling with some clump of wires or another, my dad was hunched over his strange creation. Whenever my dad went off to work, whenever my mother came in to clean and I followed, she would always carefully clean around it, shooting terrified glances in its direction. She had only touched it once to my knowledge, and her hand had recoiled as though she had touched something dead and rotting.

Now my dad was working frantically over it. He covered it one of my mother's old tablecloths, dirty white lace. I could barely see the thing under it. My dad swore under his breath. He had grabbed the wrong size hammer from the garage and ran out to rectify his mistake. I had gotten up from the floor, wiping the dirt off of the bottom of my thighs. I walked slowly towards it, my dark blue Converse the only sound in the room. The breeze blew through the uncurtained window, stirring the air which had stopped to watch me. The curtain covered the thing well, but a hand drooped off the table like the wilted leaf on a flower.

The hand was covered in soft rubber that felt like skin, and it was a light peachy color. The long, thin fingers curled inwards, just like a rotting flower. I touched the hand, felt the hard finger joints underneath the soft rubber. I felt each and every one of her fingers - I knew it was a she because the chest was a raised slope. My shaking fingers slowly peeled back the soiled lace cloth. A humanoid face was sleeping. I thought my tension should have released, like a taut string loosened, but instead, I just felt like there was something wrong. Her face had paper-thin lips curved into a peaceful smile, and her eyes were closed. She could have been sleeping, I thought. But then I noticed the cranium. I stepped back in horror. The back of her head was clear plastic, and it let me see beneath the veil of fake skin. She really was a network of nuts and bolts, metal and metal nerves. Her blood was motor oil, her brain was a computer, and her heart was not of stone, or of gold. It was of metal. I had peeked behind the curtain and decided I hadn't liked it. I looked back up her peaceful face, dreaming metal dreams with her metal brain in her deactivated sleep. I stared at the face, tears welling up in my eyes, sadness taking up all of the space in me. It would never feel anything. It would never laugh, or cry, or hear tender whispers in its ear. It would never appreciate or know how hard my father worked on her. It would never know or appreciate the man from which she came.

I know now that her name was Audrey. She was with him when it happened. I was 13, 4 years after I first beheld her face. It was a boring afternoon, the kind you had to take a nap on because you had been watching TV for too long and you had a headache. I had turned off the lights in my bedroom and opened my windows, opening them to tempt a breeze from the world outside and let some light in. My mother opened the door, wearing high-waisted houndstooth pants, her hair in a ponytail.

"Alex, have you seen your father?" She looked around my room, as though expecting him to peer out from under my bed.

"I think he's in his workshop," I mutter from my bed, pointing out the window. She rolls her eyes.

"Oh, please don't tell me he's with her," She groaned, making a soft fist and clenching it to her pink lips.

"I think so," I shrugged my shoulders and turned away from her. I was only 13, too young to care about my mother and her strange fancies and even stranger hatred of Audrey. That was what he had named the thing he had made.

"It's really something, honey," My mother had said in her fake happy voice. Just like the voice she used when I told her I wanted to join the baseball team. The voice whenever she talked to Susanne, the lady who lived across the road.