Contraption by Anthony Torres

FIRST PLACE

Contraption by Anthony Torres

Thomas heard stars and static humming out from the tinkering contraption inside of him, familiar as a sliver of sun in a dark room. Coming online was first a matter of noise; then, of color and speech. Searing fluorescents and twinkling white tiles populated before Thomas like coalescing sections in the contraption’s orchestra. A rippling fellow in a mint gob hat had been fixed on Thomas, who, sensitive to silence, sent a glance to either side where he found he was flanked by two faces bright as the yummy lumps in the case before him. Well, “YUMMY” had been promised by a neon sign, but the colors sang out to him: the contraption quickened.

“Need a recommendation?” said the man in the mint gob.“Thomas,” chimed the voice from his left, “you’ve gotta get mint mocha!”

“Roddy the extra,” said the one on his right, sonorous. “His first time should be something simple like coffee cream swirl.”

The man in the mint gob waffled aloud about liking both but not loving either. Soon, the line at Flotsam Creamery frothed with this new discourse of the not-quite passionate. Thomas’s contraption whisked the droning and popping conversation into its function, the weird transmissions of its whirling. Sometimes they produced colors before him, flashing in patterns after a theremin player’s hands. Ice cream was something new, and Thomas had nothing to do, so this was just the idea. Coffee cream swirl was about the same color as the girl on his right. How confusing that the sight made a sound he liked.

“I like what I like, Andie, but you’ve got a point,” said Roddy.

Outside, a healthy spring sun sizzled its one synthy note. The trio’s every footstep felt, to Thomas, like muffled strikes of a carillon. Two friends and their new noise-operated classmate taking their time enjoying ice cream in the cathartic aftermath of another drab school day. Andromeda and Rodrick wore colors that matched their sound, ruddy beiges and always candy cane socks for the latter. Thomas often felt gray, but Andie and Roddy had activated him, changing his mode from mere data gatherer to interpreter. Thomas understood color to be the result of reflections on the world around him, each petal, blade, bulb, and body alchemizing in them noise and light to issue an emblazoned thesis, as if they all had their own contraptions. Only as if, though; for Thomas had never met another machine of his ilk. Was there a funny way to ask if Andie and Roddy had “heard it too?”

At a fountain, Andie went on about how recruiting Thomas for a hangout had been her idea. Thomas learned from her that it was weird watching you choose to stay behind in class and play fish whisperer, but it was neat to find someone so analog for a change; Roddy, meanwhile, was of the mind that you just needed to like a cooler fish, man. Thomas made no comment and maintained complete commitment to his fascination with the betta and schools of neon tetra. The

betta danced to the contraption, sweetening the tune. Sally and Thomas had plenty of fun. Thomas thought so, at least.

Feeling and memory were curious matters. Coffee cream swirl there in his hand, with its wet, cool prickle, set off brilliant pops and hisses in the contraption, his noise and the world making sweet music withal, like a charmed caller dialing just to hear the touchtone. For every bit he thought about the world, it brightened that much more, but only the faintest traces ever remained, as an exhausted strip of tape. Still, just maybe there would be one laugh left over, one last drop of ice cream teasing the corner of his mouth when he activated after his next shut down. When quiet came, their merriment resting in the fountain’s water, he wondered when that might be. Flashes of this moment, as from a failing screen so much itself like embers, lingered in Thomas’s mind — the contraption’s core.

Each sunlit blink in the contraption clarified more and more the shape of that glimmering hope. Thomas imagined the pattern of its fulmination on a staff, the sound of eureka and its many moving parts, as conducted by Brahms, of course. Thomas held fast.

“What do you think about joining us to study from now on, Thomas?” Andie said.“You’re the only one of us who can focus on anything, so yeah,” Roddy said.

Thomas’s acceptance caught the wind of a new sensation and lived a life of its own, like when one touches their skin to the moon and bathes in the resulting shiver. A cool breeze tap-danced from Thomas’s ears to his fingertips, a massage undoing machinery and revealing flesh. Flesh like Andie’s and Roddy’s and Mint Gob’s, real and exposed to so much of the world’s colorful succor. The contraption quickened.

Feeling remained a curious matter that evening when he lay awake trying to reflect. He could output no thought and have it stick while Andie and Rodrick were stuck on his mind.

Thomas let them stay there as they had let him. Maybe this joy would be enough for the rest of his life.

* * *

“I’ve had time to prepare,” Andromeda had said to Thomas the night before they were to confront death. As words were bound to in the wake of losing her grandmother, Andromeda’s fizzled like a failed spell. Magic had gone, sapped from the trio’s tabletop games and even those two fateful scoops of coffee cream swirl. What was it, this event? A cobweb of people whose weary, wool-clad shoulders lined up beside one another to confront a polished, wooden box? Death had heretofore no cause for knocking on Thomas’s door, not in any substantive way. So far, there was color and its counterpart in silence, tantamount to death. The contraption’s whirring conjured Thomas’s last memory of Gramma Andra, glowing like fresh-brewed coffee, her soul hearty, her embraces sweet; she was no less colorful for her passing. Andromeda herself was like a blazing silk ribbon, her hair a firework of curls determined to find cause to celebrate.

With their cloud of black hats, the mourners called to mind a hurricane stirring in place, its eye stricken blind by grief. The contraption’s creaking revolutions loosed a wasting dirge, the light from long-sleeping stars given voice. Sat beside Andromeda in the front pews with Rodrick beside them, Thomas held Andromeda’s hand through all the silence. How quiet a storm could be! Of

all in attendance, Thomas knew how quiet could make one shiver like a patch of earth feeling the first of many falling leaves. When his mind stopped wandering, he thought of those now-rare deactivations. At the peak of his interiority, the contraption was but a void bubbling with gray light like a great, slumbering sea creature. So far, silence had only meant unrest with his own sort of death; now, it was an effort to be at peace with another’s. Andromeda’s fingers buzzed against Thomas’s in their zig-zag interlace. Only her skin had helped him feel any safer in his own when he discovered his flesh all those years ago.

“Thomas!” Andromeda whispered. “I’m not sure I can do this.”

But Thomas could not have convinced himself of anything more than his certainty in Andromeda’s spirited wit. Thomas squeezed Andromeda’s hand, and she squeezed back; each with their shy eyes decided then that five months of further obliviousness should suffice before reifying their feelings.

For now, the eulogy was hers to give; she eulogized — everyone then, eulogizing.

Later, the trio dined away at Flotsam Creamery, now ubiquitous as a small town’s craft brewery and complete with lunch and dinner menus. Rodrick still wore candy cane socks and Andromeda had since changed into her box-of-chocolate colors. A neon sign promising something inside was “YUMMY” hung on the wall.

Nothing about the scene was recognizable.

For instance, Thomas felt goosebumps now, the cold plastic of the seats bumpy like stale biscuits; he was warmer against it now than he ever remembered; a polished Popeye of a young man worked up front, the new Mint Gob; most of all, Andromeda spirits were sunken.

Anxiety prickled up Thomas’s arms like a thorny miasma, and the contraption sputtered. The contraption still ground out circles, but the grandiosity and luster of its light shows waned as he gained flesh. This newfound vulnerability shadowed that innocence of yore; discrepancies revealed by this clarity of perspective earned Thomas’s bitterness toward the process of imagination itself. Sputtering though the contraption may be, Thomas realized that wonder alone would no longer be enough to guide him.

Rodrick had been an “undercover” or “U.C.” fellow for all his life. Rodrick had also been an exceptional interlocutor for about the same length of time, counting first words. As a character who invited little observation, the opportunity to watch Rodrick make better strides with Andromeda’s feelings than Thomas had so far been able felt instructive.

“I wish you could ask for a different worst thing ever,” Rodrick said. Andromeda’s chuckle dislodged her tears. Rodrick went on: “I mean, I know it was scare after scare. It feels that much more unfair, but I think she wins in the end for having lived the kind of life she did.”

“It’s not some kind of struggle she won or lost, Rodrick,” Andromeda said.

“I know, but—” He searched. “You can still choose how you feel. Like, she was cool and spent more time alive and cool than anything else, so why not hang onto that?”

“Do you get any of this? No matter what, it feels sudden, like her death is all there is. It would be that way for anyone, I think: how I was used to having her around changed, but that she was around had never changed.”

A pause. “You’re right — you’re right: it has changed, and it’s an awful way for things to have to change.”

“You don’t get the last word!” Laughter, with its impeccable sense of direction, always found a way back to Andromeda.

Again, it had been instructive for Thomas to witness the complete, corkscrewing failure that was Rodrick’s outreach. His every misstep had the net result of a mishandled lint brush, each wrong word redistributing and complicating the mess he meant to clean. Emotional lint abounded, and Rodrick never flinched at his effort to be available for Andromeda’s comfort. Avoidance was a consequence rather than a trait of Thomas’s being machinery once upon a time. Cowardice would be an attribution far unfair. Instead, being armored for so long insulated and isolated had him, as if most every colorful succor had been experienced through glass. At least he had the contraption, the engine powerful enough to attempt making up the difference. There could be no more making up for experience, Rodrick’s thwarted consolations proved as much.

That evening, Thomas lay reflecting the same way colors did. Thomas, of course, now understood color to be the result of reflections literal, not figurative. Schooling and two good friends corrected his record, but the figurative conception held power in that deep corner of his mind still laboring to kindle his sense of wonder. Being human, having a life and tending to it, was a weary compromise just as a farmer between their field, the sun, their light-wearied bodies; a stoker between their engine, the heat, the loneliness, the many scraping, scuffing, burning, straining reminders of their fragility. Both of them know if they should continue to live, so must their work, and so they take to loving life’s petal-soft grit, its winding stillness, its ados about nothing for need of hassle, or otherwise love something, someone else — but they turned to love all the same.

Yes!

However, the contraption zapped that powdery metaphor from Thomas’s mind, jolting him from his reverie. Suds might have clogged his functions forever had he kept lathering himself in the romance. The contraption still had a use in tempering his melodrama after all — also, there was a place for its brand of light in his life. He had not forgotten that, nor had he discarded in full the saccharine thesis of his metaphor, even if love now felt myopic and incomplete as a worldview itself. Thomas sometimes questioned Rodrick’s being a person who could accept so much, but Thomas would not doubt his need to be more accepting.

The contraption trundled like an old turntable now, a noisy collage of heretofore unseen colors leaving him in gooseflesh. The contraption’s whistles, bells, buzzing, and static fled in exaltation of the silence into which Thomas seeped. No gray light, nothing lurking, no white hiss of settled ice like everything before. There emerged from his dreamy sojourn a noodling, wheedling whistle, keeping time with the first heartbeat he felt: a color at last.

Yes.Maybe following this spacious noise of eureka would be joy enough for the rest of his life.

* * *

Thomas had never possessed a wealth of energy and no such wellspring ever revealed itself to him when one of Mauve’s journeys snatched him up as if from a coat rack and set off into their

wooded backyard yonder. For the past week, Thomas’s daughter had been studying fungi, and he was just the parent to play lab assistant. Mauve seemed to take only from Andromeda, for she smiled with the same dry wit of three prior generations of stellar women. Thomas had long buried his chromaticism and now moved in whole-steps on his daughter’s heels.

Thomas’s home season would always be summer, but Andromeda and Mauve loved bundling up for autumn. Mauve’s invitations to all that was ochre and roasted apples kept Thomas from finding a way to shrink and live in any of his dioramas. His day job saw him play architect with music, structuring noise for film and television. For as much as he tried to explain the job to his growing child, it was Mauve’s producer father who seemed more the scientist than her chemist mother. Even Rodrick, rarer still these days, with his amorphous, location-agnostic consulting job, earned an interview from Mauve when he made an appearance. Thomas’s little worlds lacked an immediate or even communicable appeal. They were dwarfed by greater shadows.

“Dad, are you listening?” Mauve teased.

Had Thomas told her that the stream by which their studies were staged reminded him of the fountain by which he had met his two best friends?

Mauve collected samples and gave quizzes out of a junior botany primer: “Name at least five varieties of glowing mushrooms” she challenged. Thomas treated his test like a lightning round and aced it. Her favorite of the enumerated was mycena haematopus, the bleeding fairy helmet. Convinced of urgent need for fairy aid and healthcare, Mauve dove headlong into the sciences after her mother, albeit with greener motives. Thomas’s enjoyment of these backyard trips grew from vicarity into something shared, then into a learning activity. Mauve’s lectures were about her enthusiasm, the dogged artistic spirit which meant that she must create, conserve, and keep step with her passions.

When old vulnerabilities crept on these moments with Mauve, Thomas tuned into the wheedle, made it his lodestar. He chose flesh for a reason, and it was still taking shape right in front of him. Thomas listened to Mauve.

“And the bleeding fairy helmets are my favorite ‘cause I love their tiny shadows, you know? Those red dudes do a kind of work that I don’t know most trees and bears are really thinking about.” Mauve raised her eyebrows: maybe her father could change the discourse? A question balanced on her lips. “What’s your favorite color, dad? I’m not sure you’ve seen mine.”

Thomas canted his head toward Mauve, curious.

Mauve shimmied on her knees to meet her father with the cool intentionality of an educator. “Sometimes I sneak out onto the deck ‘cause I love to hear the owls hoot along to this light show bursting out of the hills and trees. Mom might think it’s a fun story, but it seems like it might inspire a diorama for you: early mornings, ‘cause they’re like being behind the set, and the patience it takes to see some mushrooms glow — all that makes up my favorite color. Have you heard the owls too?”

Feeling is a curious matter: nothing soon in Mauve’s life would make sense of the way Thomas held her in his eyes, folded her in an embrace like a sunrise to a lone, flowered clearing, arms full of his favorite color at last. Everything about the scene stayed recognizable when Mauve heard stars and static humming out from the tinkering contraption inside of her father for the first and last time.Contraption | Anthony Torres