The Muse in the Basement

She lays out the gears on the tables in the basement, the ones she built many years ago from sawhorses and sheets of marine grade plywood, nailed down and then glossed thick with polyurethane.

Each gear is perfect with the exception of one missing tooth. Where the tooth has broken free, the stainless surface of each gear goes abruptly gray, rough and glinting as if an inner core of lava sand that had been hidden since the Forging has been suddenly exposed.

There are hundreds of them, some as small as fingernails, some as large as sunflower heads. She stacks them to make them all fit, some in orderly stacks of identically sized units, others in haphazard and top-heavy towers. Where she can, she meshes them together against each other, as if an engine were forming here, waiting for repair so that the turning may begin.

This is no machine, she thinks as she sizes up the tableau, counting softly to herself. She has seen the machines of the past and imagined the machines of the future. This, which to her mind is the machine of the present, the beginning of it at least, is not ready. At the moment, it’s a sculpture in line with the ancient dictum that if it is nothing else, it must be art.

She turns from the tables and asks me for the missing teeth, which we are both sure must be around here somewhere…