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…

I learned of this website that allows you to spin a wheel and land on a square that tells you how to make a life decision based on you doing what a unicorn would do in response to the same situation you’re facing. I spun the wheel this morning and it said i should “whinny and rear.”

Whinny and rear. Well, I do this all the time so it didn’t seem to be a huge stretch. I was glad I was not advised to nuzzle a newborn or frolic in a meadow; although I was hoping that I’d be told to impale evil things, I guess I’m not really in shape for that. Good call, wheel.

So I went out the front door on my hind legs and waved my arms around. My voice has too much tobacco in it for a solid whinny, but I made some sort of approximate noise and sortied forth.

At the gas station, the pump refused my credit card so I whinnied at it. There wasn’t much space to rear up since I’d parked too close to the pump, but I managed something that didn’t look too un-unicorn like and fulfilled the prophecy. I was becoming mythical! Certainly, the pump’s refusal to honor my credit made that a distinct possibility!

I drove out to the Tower Hills, just outside the city. I knew I’d be the lone unicorn out there, since it’s not the season for the regular unicorns — while they equally adore frolicking in meadows covered in snow or wildflowers, the mud of a Massachusetts spring is something they’d rather not touch. I pulled off the road by the reservoir and found a trail there, which I followed to a bar in a clearing.

The bar was better furnished than I would have expected, and the drinks were well made and cheap. The bartender greets me with a nod; it appeared to me that I had been there before, though it all seemed new. I knew no one else, at least by their faces, though I recognized them by their traits — the floor was covered with their tired muddy tracks: griffins whose wings had been stolen, chimeras with odd parts from random plastic surgeries, basilisks who could turn you to Corian with a single glance. I joined my fellow cryptids there and we indulged in our fortunes for many, many hours until I was drunk on the dizzying rhythm of my whinnying and rearing.

Tomorrow, I’m going to return to that website with its majestic wheel, that dynamic image of cardboard and bits. It tells me old stories that make me feel like I’m not alone in believing that there’s a greater purpose. I know it’s supposed to be for amusement only, but if it’s just a joke then why did it lead me to the place where I feel most justified?

It has been easy, these first few days after buying the studio, to go through the motions: to sit at the easel in women’s clothes and think of himself as the painter who had owned it before him. He’d only glimpsed her work in passing, shards of it peeking out from under the tarps she’d wrapped it in prior to packing and leaving the place she’d held on to for so many years, the studio inherited from her father who’d expected her to move on and become a doctor or something else more practical instead of dressing herself in his shirts and sitting before the easels he’d left as well, sitting for many years until the day that a whisper, perhaps the sound of a train in the distance or a voice in the hallway, moved her to pick up a tube and squeeze it onto a palette.

From what he could see, there was a lot of red under those tarps.

Now, sitting here, he understood a lot more about how this might have happened. One sits and thinks, he tells himself, until an unoriginal thought becomes so strong that the weight of it breaks over you and you rush to fill the crack with whatever you call art.

He arranges a fold of her smock over his jeans. He puts on his headphones and begins to drown.

The word “gunstock” sends the listener into a maze of potential sensory paths, evoking as it does everything from the anticipation of a fast run down a New Hampshire mountain with powder surging around the tips of your skis to the feel of oiled walnut against your shoulder, and there’s anticipation there too — the sound coming a split second late, the long whoosh of the bullet drawn out into the air at supersonic speeds just ahead of the blow to your shoulder.

You will not know much of the reality of either of these things until they have happened to you, so if you have not skied or shot, the word “gunstock” is a theory at best. It is a gate that may lead you to contradictory places, or at least to places that bear little resemblance to each other until you decide to cut through the walls of the maze and see that in truth, “gunstock” means “rapid movement” with a related meaning of “potential death.”

That “joy” is also operative in each of those meanings may not be apparent until you cut through the green walls that define the maze established by the presence of the word.

Learning which of the meanings is operative changes the nature of the maze.

Holding all of the meanings to be true in all situations is key to cutting away all mazes.

Coming at last to the river he’d written about so often but had never seen, he dips his hand and feels the flow — a strong, velvety tug. If he were to fall in he’d be carried along before he could learn to control it, struggling at first but soon enough relaxing toward an inevitable collapse of his will to survive…

How bad could that be? He’d just placed everything he had carried here onto the bank, after all, where someone could find it if they came looking, and he had made it all specifically to be used — that he may not ever have been the one destined to use them did not mean they were not useful. They would be found eventually. They might lead someone to look for him, or they might not…perhaps they would simply walk off with his things…

Rather than be forever jealous of the use his work might be to another beside himself, he steps in and falls immediately onto his back, is swept along, and noticing a dark rise in the water up ahead, perhaps a hidden rock, he steers toward it as best he can, praying that if he lodges against it it may be enough to hold him back from the roar of the falls ahead, though it may not be, and if no one is watching, if he misses the last chance to catch it and goes on down the stream, all this will be unknown forever, someone will find the things he left behind him and go their own way with them while this worry, this exhilaration, the choice itself, will remain unknown…

the dark rise in the water…

the way it feels, felt, has felt, is feeling…