Everyday he would find himself at his job.  That is, he really wasn’t sure how he arrived but he would hang his grey wool great coat on the brass hanger, press the ceramic on button and go to work.  The shop was beautiful with great plate glass windows framed in mahogany that looked out on a prominent cobbled side street with a gas street lamp.  It was just a few doors down from the High Street.  All the brass shined and the marble floors sparkled.

 Father, that was his name though he couldn’t recall ever hearing it spoken, worked the bellows of the machine.  He pumped them and bright things moved about and spun and twisted in a black velveteen vastness.  The machine seemed immeasurably huge.  Each evening a nappy headed child with golden ringlets and dressed in a fine white suit would bring him a bowl of his favorite soup of buckwheat, mushrooms and onions.  He would eat it while still at his bench, then, when done he would gather his coat and push the ceramic off button, dowsing the lights.

 He is not sure how it happened, but one day he noticed that the windows had become obscured with grime, so much so, that you could not see the street lamp much less the cobbles of the street.  He saw too that his coat was worn to just a few threads and the brass had turned black.  He observed too that the shop was cobwebbed and the floors littered.  How had this happened?  Didn’t anyone care?

 But he worked on and on.  Then one day the bright things in the machine were barely discernable and he saw some bits where missing and others hung funny like a boy’s arm after a fall from an apple tree; some parts of the machine were stained from spilled soup.  The bellows leaked and the machine creaked.  And he saw too that the golden child had become a grayed old man wrinkled and disheveled and his once bright suit had yellowed with brown stains and appeared more like what one would expect on an exhumed corpse.  He had no soup this evening.

 The worn child looked up and said, “Father it is time.”  

He hadn’t the energy to push the ceramic off button, but it didn’t matter the lights had dimmed.  They left hand in hand.