Work Text:
The Machine sat on your dining room table, intricate and gleaming. Each piece had been made by hand with great care - the brass, the wood, the silver, the spun copper wires, the ornate glass knobs. There was a kind of him that seemed to eminate from the machine, and the room felt alive and full of potential though all of that energy may have been coming from you.
You'd been working on the Spirit Machine for months, hammering and tinkering in your workshop, adding new parts, adjusting the wires, and touching up the paint. You believed that one day this machine would allow you to talk to the dead. You thought it would galvanize the electricity in the air like a kind of barrier between the living and the dead.
You did it all for me.
It seemed as if sparks were always flying out the windows of your shop, and sometimes the whole shack filled with smoke. The children in the area thought a witch was living in the woods, mixing potions and making spells day and night. Even though you kept the door and windows locked, the constaint vibrations of the tools had loosened the nails holding the slats of wood onto the walls, and some of those same children soon were trying to look through the gaps. No one knew what you were making in that little shack in the back of your property, but you'd burn piles of paper and scraps of wood beneath the stars, and the smoke and the spark and the fire made adults in town wonder if you were doing something sinister.
The idea for the Spirit Machine had come to you in a dream. You'd been mourning me a long time, and your greif was threatening to wreck you. The morning of the dream, you woke up with a start. You had scrambled through your bedroom, stubling to find paper and a pencil. The image stayed firm in your mind and you drew it in a kind of fever. You'd never had an experience like that before, and you were shaken by it. You remembered Jacob wrestling all night with an angel, who finally blessed him as the sun rose in the morning.
I knew you better than anyone else in the world. I knew how deeply you felt things, how frustrated you became when you felt powerless. Nothing makes living people feel more powerless than Death.
The creation of the Spirit Machine gave you a new found feeling of purpose and pride. It helped focus your energy and your greif. You used all your skills to build it, and learned new ones as well. You drew detailed plans based on the image from your dream. You cut down trees from the woods behind your home and carefully carved and joined each piece, using knives and lathes and drills. You blew the glass, hammered the copper, fashioned the ceramic spools, and meticulously painted the entire thing with sable-hair brushes you made yourself. You weren't just building a machine, you were making a work of art, a moving sculpture and a scientific invention all at once. It was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen.
I don't remember much about being alive, I don't remember the moment I died, and I don't remember most of the things I did. But I remember you. You thought you needed a machine to bring me back. You thought if you couldn't see me then I wasn't present, if you could not hear me I was not speaking to you, if you could not feel me then we could not touch. You thought the machine would change all that, but I was already there with you. I didn't need a device to be there. You yourself were the Spirit Machine. You were the thing that tied me to the world.
What will happen after you die. I do not know.
You invited the curious children who had always snuck around your workshop to see the finished machine. They told their parents about the strange creation, and many of the parents came to see it as well. Soon, visitors from out of town were coming to take a look. Most people didn't understand what it was, and many thought you were crazy, but somehow everyone understood that you had taken your sadness and loss and made something beautiful out of it.
You met artists, scientists, and dreamers, and you engaged in long conversations and exchanged fascinating letters with authors and philosophers for years afterward. In a way, I believe that it saved your life... and if you want to know a secret, that's why I gave you the dream in the first place.