Birds chirping outside our morning window
and we idled between the sheets as is our wont
when suddenly she said to me
“Hug me” and held out her arms.
I obliged of course
and wondered again why I never think to give,
without being asked,
those long hugs she loves.
I know she would love them all the more if she didn’t have to ask.
And so we laid pressed together
my head against her shoulder
lifting her hair and caressing the back of her neck
in the manner that I know also that she loves
when I became aware of a faintly mechanical sound
something like perhaps the distant sound of the engines of the ship
that carried you to and through the doldrums of the Sargasso Sea
during the voyage where you first found love.
Curious as to whence the sound might come,
I tilted my head and lifted it from her chest.
Strangely, the sound disappeared.
I placed my head again against her body and again,
I heard the faint sounds of metal striking metal
cogs and pulleys
whirring and clanking
vibration and power.
I was reminded immediately of a trip I had once taken
to the home town of my mother
surrounded by her uncles
who doted on her and by association, on me.
Those kindly old men showed me the wonders of their town ....
their sad golf course
full of burrs and spiders and prairie dog holes,
their lake
where they had labored to build bath houses
that the pimply teens peeked into
when their teacher changed her clothes,
the silos at the end of town
where the young people gunned their engines on a Friday night,
and their pride and joy,
the power plant that lit their town.
My great-uncle drove with me to the plant
late one dark evening
in his hand the key
with which he had been entrusted after years of civic service.
As we walked up the steps to the front doors
I felt a constant vibration and dull sense of endless motion
almost sinister in its constant hint of power.
My uncle proudly threw open the doors
and we stepped onto a steel platform
looking down on two hulking dark forms below.
The smell was of oil and steel
as the engines labored below us
to cast flickering sit-coms on widow Horodecki's secondhand TV
while one of my other great-uncles
and the good widow
writhed around on her davenport
trying once more to try once more.
I remember thinking at that moment
“you mean this is all that stands between the entire town and total darkness”?
But as I had at the golf course
and at the lake
I held my tongue
and listened as my uncle expounded on the glory of it all.
An old man thinks well of a young man
when the young man stays silent and listens.
These thoughts and many more
flew threw my head in mere instants as I lay with my head against her
listening to her secret
listening to the cool precise machines wrapped in warm skin and pores.
I pulled back and looked into her eyes.
She seemed so normal,
of flesh and blood,
of fluids and thoughts
that no one would have ever guessed her secret.
She of course mistook my look
and basked in the attention
peppering me with kisses
and soon distracting me from my thoughts.
In the days and months to follow
I never told her I knew her secret
and in fact rarely saw any further evidence of it
apart from the occasional moment when
some gear or cog within her would seize momentarily
and she would freeze or stumble for just an instant,
recovering automatically
in her manner well practiced.