Dawn had risen across the sprawling reaches of desert.
Two monolithic structures of iron stood resolute against the totality of sky and turned in scything sweeps of three tremendous blades that held span greater than any creature who had grown from the earth could reach.
These were the Turbines of desert and as they turned man stole from the winds ever rolling majesty. The West had been there when the desert was young, it had walked with the wind, it took only the power asked of it and left no gale becalmed as it turned. East was a new tower built upon the ruins of another, it shone with the blazing pride of its own creation and swept away the air as if it were merely an inevitability.
The warmth of morning had filled the Turbine with a comfortable familiarity that the apprentice was surprised to notice. The desert was always hot, and metal exterior of the upper towers were only loosely insulated but this was a warmth that noticeable, and when the unexpected becomes noticeable a good engineer will always become concerned.
Roused from their sleep, the apprentice felt a sharp fright of displacement, this was not their bed, their home within the sands was gone now, they had collapsed into the cot of a small storage room just a fleeting few hours before.
Finding a nook and blanket for rest was an easy task within the winding rooms of West Turbine but to find a quiet place where the droning clash of gears or the hum of electrical windings gossiping the night was a harder task.
The apprentice yawned and noticed a tremble of exhaustion still at play upon their fingertips. Yesterday they had stood atop the turbine and height was simple thing of panoptic awe. There was a connection that tugged at the soles of feet as they looked across the desert, an interconnected webbing of stick and branch that became roots, became the soil. They were a leaf up there, the highest leaf upon the tallest branch, looking upon the world and seeing it in truth. Hanging from a windblown hatch in the silted dark was different. They had done the right thing in a dangerous way and a small voice inside them warned that their survival should not breed complacency; it was a voice that sounded very similar to Helma’s.
‘Report to logging office 3.761 tomorrow morning at 0700 sharp,’ Helma had said without indication of where this was within the labyrinth of the turbine. They had been late on that first day and Helma had only frowned, asking them to not repeat their lateness as if it was a soft insult to the engineer.
The voice sounded again as if they were trying to enforce a message, survival should not breed complacency.
The engineers would complain that time was hard to keep track of within the turbine athough there were clocks placed in every corridor. The antiquated bell-system that Garen had spent so much time on read 0640 and the apprentice sighed in relief. People were always missing these clocks; some didn’t believe that there were any at all, but Garen suggested that they spent too much time reading the newspaper.
‘Time moves slower when there’s a clock in the room.’ he said while attempting to dry a dampened cigarette over a heat pump, ‘That why they’ve all been installed in the corridors. You watch a clock when it shares the room, a good one should only ever catch your eye, remind your internal rhythm of where it should be.’
Smiling at the odd electrician’s ways, the apprentice scrambled up a set of familiar stairs and tripped into the corridor of the logging offices, seeing the time as they passed and noting that some graffiti had led it to read 1700: change of shift.
‘Good timing,’ Helma said as she emerged from a doorway obscured by reports and wrinkled diagrams, speaking with a tone that was neither congratulatory or remonstrative. It was flat, she hadn’t slept.
‘I’m assuming that our electrician didn’t fill your brain entirely with smoke?’ she said, pointing two fingers to the ground and swiping them to the left in a dismissive gesture that the apprentice took to mean as rude, ‘where is he? I was going to thank him for his work on the boilers.’
Knowing that thank was a loosely implied word, the apprentice looked up at the engineer and thought it important to speak plainly.
‘Mika needed him,’ they said, ‘there’s some float switches that he had to change.’
The impassive stare from the engineer did little to reveal what mystery his task actually entailed. The apprentice imagined somewhere dark, cold, a place where even the rats would whimper.
Helma returned into the paper strewn room, gesturing for the young apprentice to follow.
‘The weather is an important part of our Turbine,’ she said picking up a neat bundle of papers and seeming at a loss of where to put them in the mess, ‘it is the only part of us that we cannot fix. We live with it, and we must adapt to it. This is why you will always start in the offices.’
Placing the paper on the flattest section of a desk, Helma consulted the neatly set numbers against a bank of oscilloscope that filled the room with a green embering flicker, their cathodes were tired from countless days of operation.
It was strange seeing the engineer tired. She was no more frail than the blunt of her iron humour but the wild energy of a woman who had jumped from the Turbine yesterday was restrained now. She seemed serious, almost as if she knew that something was wrong but couldn’t pin down what the problem was yet.
‘Do you remember the that sky we saw yesterday?’ Helma said after a while, ‘something has been making a noise in the back of my mind and it’s bothering me.’
The apprentice remembered watching the sky over their home, they would lay upon their roof and see ballads within the clouds. A call of weather to come was shouted by the passing of birds, the temperature rising and falling and the fullness of a blue sky above.
‘Stillness,’ the apprentice said without noticing they had spoken, ‘those were clouds that ride upon the tail of wind.’
J. McCray
2022
Sunday Short Stories 