Evelynn East Glimpses

[Evelynn East]

It wasn't that Evelynn particularly disliked the motel where she'd crashed when her car first broke down. It had been clean, comfortable, and the owners - an elderly couple - had been quite kind to her. But a motel wasn't a home, and she was starting to feel as though she needed a place to call her own. She needed somewhere quiet to work. Some place she could retreat to, some place she could call her own.

The apartment was small. Some would call it cramped, but Evelynn preferred the term "cozy." It was the recently finished basement of a house in the suburbs of Sacramento - a cute, older little house, all wood paneled and plaster. A character home, some would call it. One might uncharitably say that was a euphemism for "old" and "musty" but Evelynn liked it.

It reminded her of her grandfather's shop.

She had almost no furniture yet, which made the little desk in the corner look all the more out of place - it, unlike the rest of the apartment, was cluttered with stuff. Boxes stacked neatly up against the back wall on the surface, and even more on the floor next to the desk. There were several swiveling lamps on the desk in varying brightnesses and colours, and several more lenses in varying shapes and sizes. The rest of the surface was cluttered with tools and little unused gears and screws. And in the center, a little bronze bird fluttered daintily against a silver flower.

Evelynn sat at the desk with her elbows resting on the surface, holding her chin in her hands. She smiled, watching the little bird flit back and forth, the fluttering of the wings slowing as the machine slowly but surely ran out of energy. She reached out and pressed down on the tail with her finger, watching it spin back up to speed. Her work was her love, and her only connection left to the family that didn't miss her.

It had been too long since she'd had a place to create.

[Evelynn East]

Sacramento was supposed to be warmer than Chicago. Warmer than Cambridge, too. But then, it was getting later and later into fall now, and Evelynn supposed she should have guessed that the nights would be cold enough to require a heavier coat. Not that the chill was going to be enough to send her back indoors. Not on a night like tonight.

She'd managed to get her hands on the missing and broken pieces she needed to get her old clunker up and running again, just today. And so, naturally, she celebrated by driving in the darkest direction she could see until she was miles out of town, and found a hill in the middle of a farmer's field. She wasn't supposed to be there, exactly - she was pretty sure this was technically private property. But the only place for miles where it was both empty enough to see the sky and not lit to the point where the stars were impossible to see were farmers fields. She just had to hope the people here were going to be nice enough to ask her to leave before they called the cops. If they came out and saw her in the first place, anyway, which was unlikely enough to begin with.

Shivering, she rubbed her arms, watching the little misty puffs of breath escaping her mouth and nose as she breathed, waiting for her fingers to warm up again inside her mitts. She was trying to finish putting her telescope together, but it was cold enough that her fingers kept going numb, and she'd start shivering, and then it was harder to work... And once, her trembling fingers had nearly caused her to lose a piece, and she decided it was better to be patient and wait for her fingers to warm up again than risk losing out on this perfect night.

The sky was completely cloudless, crisp and clear. The stars shone cold and bright, like glowing diamonds against black velvet. She finished the telescope. Then, holding her breath, she leaned down to look through it for the first time in months. She could see Saturn, slowly crawling past the infinite stars. She could see shifting clouds of gas, the Milky Way, and constellations so full of stars that the patterns disappeared in the scattered light.

And she could see them, in her minds eye, spinning, ever-rotating, around and around, dancing past and through each other, since long before she was born and forever after she died.

Oh yes, she was going to build something beautiful tomorrow.

[Evelynn East]

Shouting. Again.

She heard the male voice booming through the wall, then the female voice, shrill and more readily able to pierce the wooden division between Evelynn and her neighbours. The man hadn't stopped yelling. The woman was just yelling over him, now.

It was getting worse. Bad enough that Evelynn was considering calling the cops, despite her fear of the police in general. Red, hot, licking flames of anger pushed through the wall, tempting her with their taste, and she tasted. It was bitter, old and petty, but it was glamour nonetheless.

Every house has its secrets. It had seemed perfect. She should have known. Maybe she'd be looking for a new place to stay a lot sooner than she'd thought.

[Evelynn East]

Papers were scattered across the desk, some of them floating to the floor. Behind the chair, a massive tote of Lego was dumped all over the carpet, half-sorted. Pens and pencils were stuck in odd places, always within ready reach when a new idea struck her. In short, a glorious mess.

Evelynn herself was seated in her desk chair, frowning. She knew a few things about security, but if she was to present a good idea to the Freehold for those lockboxes Coco suggested, it would have to be something amazing. Anything less was not good enough for something that would be so important to the security of the 'Hold. Hiding the box was somewhat less of a concern - as long as it was small enough, it could easily fit inside something inconspicuous. What she was trying to do now was figure out the best way to secure the box. There was a half-finished Lego combination safe sitting in an open drawer, ignored in favour of the video playing on her laptop. Wide eyes took in the various 3D printers with something akin to hunger.

"That would make everything so much easier..."

Someday. Maybe even someday soon. Sure, the results wouldn't be strong enough for a finished lockbox, but at least with one of those she wouldn't be stuck rapid prototyping with Lego.

[Evelynn East]

The yelling had stopped.

Honestly, Evelynn hadn't even noticed at first. Her neighbors were very quiet until they were abruptly very not. She wasn't even sure what made her realize that something had changed. She'd been home one evening, alone, goofing off on her computer, looking at pretty new layouts and backgrounds for her Etsy store in a shallow attempt to avoid doing any real work that evening, when it struck her that it had been weeks since the last time her neighbors had engaged in one of their explosive fights. Perhaps it was the itching awareness that she needed a harvest - she hadn't done so in a while, not since she'd often just taken a little taste of their anger each time they started shouting. After all, if she had to listen to it, at least she could get something out of it.

But there was nothing. And once she noticed that, she noticed something else. Sorrow. Suffocating and thick, seeping through the walls and pooling heavily across the floor near their shared wall. Sour with guilt and shame, and that strange, bittersweet relief that one knows they shouldn't feel, the kind that came of being happy to witness someone else's suffering.

There was a little girl out in the hallway the next morning when Evelynn left her apartment to go shopping. She was shocked - how had she not even known a child lived in the building?

The sorrow and guilt clung to her like a blanket. She was sitting on the front steps, a doll in her arms, but the motions with which she played made it clear that she was only doing what she felt she was supposed to, and she was looking at the doll as if she resented it.

Evelynn crouched next to the girl, but the girl didn't respond. Either she hadn't noticed her presence, or she was being ignored. "What's your name? I'm Evelynn."

The girl sighed heavily. "My name's Katie."

"How come I've never seen you around here before? Did you just move in?" Evelynn sat down on the steps next to Katie, tilting her head to watch the reluctant motions of the doll.

"I've lived here a while. I just wasn't allowed to play outside very much. Mom was scared they'd take me away."

"Who's they?"

"The police." The little girl stopped her play and abruptly looked up at Evelynn, her expression torn. "My dad used to give me bruises, and my mom was scared the police would take me away if anyone saw, but he's gone now, so I can go outside." She looked down at the doll, twisting it in her hands. "My mom is sad he's gone, but I'm happy. Does that make me bad?"

Evelynn paused. There was sorrow in this little girl, but perhaps not at the loss of her father. "I don't think that makes you bad, no. But you don't look very happy to me."

Katie just shrugged, a lock of thin blonde hair slipping off her shoulder with the motion. "I don't like it when my mom cries. She's been crying a lot since my dad left."

Evelynn nodded. There wasn't much to be said, really. It wasn't an easy thing to explain to a child. So instead, she slipped one arm around Katie's thin shoulders, and asked her about her doll.

[Evelynn East]

There was a woman sitting in Evelynn's living room, crying.

It had happened to unexpectedly. The elderly lady had arrived at her door, asking for "the watchmaker who works here" so Evelynn had invited her in. She'd produced a beautiful old pocket-watch that had stopped winding. It was an easy thing to fix, and Evelynn had told her so, offering with a bright smile to fix it here and now. "Should only be a half an hour or so!" She offered the woman a seat, a cup of tea, and pointed out the remote for her television, should she want something to entertain herself while she waited.

It was a simple matter of replacing the mainspring, and maybe the escapement. She had the pieces - it was just a question of opening up the watch and finding the right size of pieces to make the replacement. She'd started her work, her mind focusing so completely on the task at hand that she didn't notice, at first, the small sound. Or, rather, she'd simply assumed the woman had turned on the TV. It grew louder, over the next few minutes, until Evelynn realized quite abruptly that the woman was crying.

She froze, lifting her head to look at the woman with an expression of concern. "Are you alright?"

The woman nodded, drawing a handkerchief out of her pocket to blow her nose. And then she began to speak.

"My husband died two years ago." Her voice warbled slightly as she spoke, and she stopped to contain another small sob. "That watch... was his. It was a gift given to him by his father on our wedding day. He'd get up every morning and wind it while he brushed his teeth. It never stopped. Never went a day without winding. And when he died, I took up the duty of winding it every day since then. It's been running every day since we were married." She paused again, this time to dab her eyes. "I-I know it's silly, but when I woke up this morning to wind it and the spring broke..." Her voice broke, too, then, and she had to stop for a moment to gather herself.

But Evelynn understood. Something like that, something that's been done in continuation for years... as irrational as it might seem to some people, the snap of that spring represented a irreparable loss to this woman. It represented the loss of a connection to her husband, and to his love for her. Heartbreaking didn't even begin to describe it.

Quietly, slowly, the little changeling turned in her chair, so she was sitting - awkwardly, but she didn't care - half facing her desk and half facing the woman. "Would you, um, tell me about him? If you don't mind."

The repair was supposed to take a half-hour. Maybe an hour, at the very most. But Evelynn worked slowly, and spent the afternoon going over every piece in the watch with a fine-toothed comb, to make sure it would run perfectly for the foreseeable future. And all the while, the woman waxed poetic about her husband - about their wedding day, their honeymoon, their children. Their vacations together. The time he lost his job unexpectedly. How they'd nearly lost their home. The way the whole family had pulled together until he'd found a new, better job. How they'd carefully controlled their spending so they could afford to send her to school to become a nurse, so they'd never be at risk like that again. Their retirement party. Getting bored after six months of retirement, and deciding to start a small business of their own.

The sun was setting by the time the story had finished, and Evelynn finally took that opportunity to slide those last few pieces into place and close the back of the watch up once again.

"Would you like to do the honors?"

The woman took the watch gingerly, reverently, in her hands. She seemed to almost hold her breath as turned the small handle over once, twice, three times.

Tick. Tick. Tick.