by M. Christian
Looking more and more the father of a screaming-in-infancy religion, and less the mad-seer, Spear dispatched his believers, dispensing with them, like hosts of the realm, the few remaining coins in their possession.
“Cyrus, you shall go and fetch wheels of varying sizes. Be certain that their weight not be so great as to preclude their turning with ease,” Spear said to the young engineering student whose face, marred by smallpox, was hidden by a great black beard.
“Your task, Youngfellow, is to purchase wire with the correct vibrations. I trust you, above anyone else, to recognize these vibrations by the wire’s feel between the fingers,” Spear said to the old railway man who shook with a consumptive cough when excited, which was often.
‘Bartholomew, you shall acquire cylinders of rosy copper,” Spear told the rather too pretty and too dandied young lad from New York.
“I need your fine eye, Mary, to go and bring us only canvas of good quality for the making of bellows,” Spear said to the old matron whose single eye was a disturbing too-blue.
“Unis, you go and seek out strips of tanned hide so that belts may be employed in the creation of the divine Motor,” Spear said to the stone-stern and perpetually unsmiling headmistress.
And so each was sent, little money and elaborate instructions in hand, out into the town of Lynn – till Spear remained with but one of his machine-enraptured flock.
“Faith, you of the beautiful gaze, the arresting demeanor, you shall remain with me while the others acquire the necessary physical requirements of our Mechanical Savior, for I am in need of your. . . assistance to prepare what shall become our High Rock, the seat of the birth of our Mechanical Deliverance into Glory!” Spear said to the handsome maiden with hair the color of hot embers, eyes that danced with a sparkling entreaty to be gazed into, a bosom full and firm, and so shapely, so perfectly formed ankles . . .
“What a wonder this day we create, Faith: something with the aspects of the earthly mated with the spiritual. This will be a true marriage of elemental forces,” John Murray Spear said, with breathy passion, eyes dancing with fierce intensity.
“Tell me more, Mr Spear. Oh, please, enlighten me of our great mission. Speak of it more!” Faith said, stepping close – very close – her eyes also lit with passion . . . though of a more earthy nature.
“Ours will be a creation that will align the chaotic nature of this sphere, a Mechanical Messiah that will deliver us from our primitivism on this plane,” Spear said, stepping equally close, his hands seizing her bloom sleeves, his heat conducting even through the thick, scratchy material.
“Oh, yes, Mr Spear. . . John . . . speak of this Motor we build,” Faith said, pushing her body hard against his.
“Ours are but the hands . . . Faith . . . nothing but the physical extensions of the Association of Electricizers. Those who have blessed us with the information to see to its noble creation,” Spear said, his hands dropping, grazing the slope of her protected chest.
“Yes . . . our ‘physical extensions’. I know what you mean, John. I am so proud to be their . . . your . . . hands in this,” Faith said, taking his hands in hers and placing them on her heaving bosom.
“The Motor is their will, with our physicality, towards a mutually beneficial union where we shall both be able to achieve new heights of enlightenment,” Spear said, his hands working the delightful fullness of her breasts.
“Oh, yes, John, speak to me of our impending . . . enlightenment,” Faith said, hastily unbuttoning the front of her blouse, fingers dancing a frenzy.
“We cannot know of the full impact of the Motor on our essences – can the ant know the dreams of men? When the Motor is infused with the force of pure force of life we shall be brought up to unparalleled heights,” Spear said, helping her shuck off her blouse and then part her pale underthings.
“Oh . . . John . . . what a wonder the Motor shall be!” Faith said, bringing her hands forward to squeeze and caress her breasts, relishing in the sensual ache.
“It will indeed be one, Faith – a true miracle. And we shall be here to see its creation and then its . . . birth,” Spear said, his hands echoing her own. Then, lowering himself to the dirty floor of the farmhouse, gently he took one of her breasts (the left) in his hands, and kissed the swollen pink nipple.
“Oh, Lord, John . . . oh, Lord . . . yes, such miracles . . .” Faith said, sighing with deep passion – a rich, throaty sound – as Spear kissed, then licked, then sucked at her tight nipple.
“Yes, Faith, we are truly fortunate to be here at this time, to be involved with this momentous delivery . . .” he said, lifting the billows of her skirts, pushing aside the linen curtains.
“Oh, yes, John . . . so fortunate . . .” she said as he rustled undergarments, hands fluttering against her quivering thighs.
“We are blessed, Faith, so . . . blessed . . .” Spear said, ferociously moving cotton until a triangle of silken red hair was revealed. This, too, he kissed – at first with gentle contacts, and then with more and more penetrating intensity.
“. . .” Faith said, which translated as a breathy moan accompanying a push downward with her sex, reflexively, to get more of his tongue into her.
“. . .” Spear said, which translated (same language) as fumbling his too-stiff throbbing penis free of many similar layers of itchy clothing. When his bare hand met his member, a sigh only momentarily interrupted his work on her well-lubricated region.
This went on, mutually pleasurable to both parties, until an ecstatically explosive orgasm vented up through her, spilling down into his mouth as a gush of slightly salty fluid.
Almost spent himself, he rocked back onto his haunches and then, shockingly hard, onto the floor of the farmhouse – his organ pointing authoritatively straight up, tipped by a pearlescent drop of fluid.
“We are witnesses to the creation, and the birth, of a divine engine –” Spear said, pushing himself up, begging himself to become impaled on the slippery hot recess of her molten sex.
“We are . . . helping the mechanical forces of the . . . oh, God!” she said, seeing his need, excited by his need, and lowering herself carefully to straddle, then feed his male member into her too-hot, too-silken, too-wet entrance, feeling the fat tip of him push, then slide up into her. A musical moan of delight escaped her bitten lips.
“We are the orchestrations of the creation of an engineering messiah – oh, oh, oh!” he said as she eased herself down, stuffing herself with his erect manhood. Then, with escalating intensity – driven by a need as old as humanity itself – she began a repetitive rhythm: up and down, up and down, up and down – a liquid, slapping motion that ebbed with his member almost escaping the lips of her sex, and peaked with him filling her to her utmost capacity.
After an uncertain time their moans and cries and incoherent bursts of near-speech, near philosophical balderdash, synched, perfected, then climbed to a pair of syncopated screams towards a deity that they hoped perhaps to outdo, with their engineered divinity, their mechanical savior.
Passion echoing down into an exhaustion that began to firmly pull them down into sleep, Faith and John Murray Spear managed to extricate themselves from their primitive embrace of genitals, adjust their voluminous and very often scratchy clothing, and put on somewhat civil faces for the rest of their congregation as they returned from their errands.
. . . an 1854 contraption, but surreally hinting at the complex technologies of our current civilization: a personal computer made of glass mason jars, coils of copper tubing, sheets of tin, old wagon wheels and the remains of a pot-bellied stove.
. . . a machine of a previous century: a maddenly complex clock – an interdimensional mandala of impossibly interlocking gears, fantastically meshing wheels, magically transversing pendulums, and springs coiling into eye-smarting spirals.
. . . a nineteenth century contraption of perilous articulations: the egg rolls down the tin gutter, lands in the funnel, which trips a lever that drains water from a jug,
fills a bucket, lifting a cork, relaxing a string, tightening a bow, firing the arrow, hitting the target, ringing the bell – and on, and on, into a cascading eternity.
. . . an Age of Steam cyclotron: a tremendous squeezing weight pressing down through the action of great screws and pulleys onto a complex box of tightly spinning gears that, action reproduced on a molecular level, tried to split atoms like a hammer with an anvil.
The New Motor, the Divine Device, the Mechanical Savior of the Race could have looked like any of those – but rather, embarrassingly, it just sat there: a cold collection of parts taking up a major part of the farmhouse.
“Arise, spirit of the Machine! Awaken, Spiritual Engine! Be given the force of Life, oh Magnificent Instrument – breathe, beat, tick, hum, click, whirr – come on, dammit!” intoned (then whispered) John Murray Spear, standing before the inert pile of metal and other parts.
“Hear my words, New Motor – hear them and take of our essence, borrow of our life to spark your action! We are here, Great Ethereal Mechanism, and we exist so that you may operate and live!” Spear said, passion building, them smashing through his words – ringing them off the farmhouse walls and slowly reaching his congregation (especially one of then).
“It is time, Motor, time for your automated birth so that you might lead us into a New Age!” John Murray Spear said, words ringing out, echoing with noble desire – and sparking a more human version in one particular person.
“Now, Motor – now! My voice, my spiritual essence reaches out to you, oh Holy Implement of the Association of Electricizers, and sparks in you the motive power, the magnetic store of nature!” Spear thundered, the energy of his passion stirring those present (yes, one more than others) to feel their own thrilling charge of excitement.
So spoke Spear, intonation after intonation, plea after plea, summons after summons till his flock panted, eyes glazed and hearts pounding, themselves reeling from the charge he was raising – even if the New Motor, dead as anything, still sat immobile.
One of them, even more charged, heart pounding more, eyes even more glazed, was so seized by the driving determination, the impassioned oration of Spear, by a physical manifestation of his determination . . . her legs failed her and she fell to the floor, and her hands, moving like enchanted serpents, plunged beneath her skirts and began to feverishly work her melting sex in ecstatic syncopation.
Also feeling the charge of Spear’s oration, the rest of the little New Motor flock was similarly energized – though not, definitely not, to get down on the rough floor and begin to masturbate. Still, to be fair, they didn’t stop her from continuing either.
Complex skirts pushed up and out of the way, she spread her pale thighs wide so as best to gain access to her aching sex – her pulsing, liquid, burning neither regions that so desperately ached for contact – stroking, rubbing, penetrating release.
Hands fluttering a sensual dance at her swollen lips, quivering vulva and pulsing clitoris, she worked and worked and worked some more until a shattering orgasm applauded Spear’s spiritual conjuration of the New Motor –
– and then, slowly, achingly, but also definitely, it started to click, then to whirr, then to vibrate, hum, oscillate, revolve, and otherwise simply move . . . the Physical Savior of the Race, The New Messiah, the New Motor began to work.
And Faith, exhausted, smiled, smiled, smiled –
Sometime later, the flock – in their less-than-comfortable cheap beds, but too tired with celebration to mind – lost in dreams of glorious spiritual engines, Spear stood before the great machine, now filled with motive life, his eyes still wide after many hours.
“So . . . incredible. In my dreams . . . no, not even in my most vivid of dreams could I ever have imagined the beauty of you, Motor. No, I could never have envisioned the glory of your movement, the power of your functioning. I am enraptured with your mechanism –”
“John,” Faith said – also tired, but not quite tired enough for bed – touching her priceless spiritualist on the shoulder. “Please, John, can I, may I . . . again?”
“You are truly the Mechanical Messiah, Motor. You are the Divine Engine. I am your servant and engineer – humbled before your actions, your motions –” Spear said, his eyes only for the vibrant contrivance.
“John, my body – I need you, John. You have awakened me, John. I need to feel you again,” Faith said, voice heavy with desire, clutching firmly Spear’s arm.
“Nothing, Motor – nothing on this earth shall keep me from my service of your gears, your parts, your elements. I shall be your Priest of the Oil Can, your Deacon of the Wrench, your Bishop of Repair . . . I am yours, Motor, and no one else’s –” Spear said, glazed sight enraptured with awe at its motions.
“Please, John, I want you. I need you – please don’t make me beg, John. Please –” Faith said, tears gleaming on her cheeks, tugs becoming more insistent.
“Great Implement of the Association of Electricizers, your motion grants me the greatest joy! I am here – I am here for you now, Messiah. My life as of today is yours. Your nuts I will tighten, your belts I will lubricate, your spokes I will straighten, your glass I will polish, your metal I will make gleam with my dedicated hands and all the strength granted me in this fleshy shell –” Spear said, pulling away from the woman and stepping closer, bathing in the technological glimmer of his holy gizmo.
“John, you cocksucker, are you going to fuck me or not?” Faith said – or words to an 1854 equivalent – screaming into his ear over the din of the machine and the single-mindedness of his locked gaze.
But to her own impassioned, driven, passionate pleas and invocations all John Murray Spear said was, “– What was that again, Motor? What is it you need? What is it, my Physical Savior of the Race, my New Messiah? What do you require of myself, your most humble servant? The tightening of some wayward screw, the adjustment of some loose belt, perhaps? I am yours, Motor – tell me what you desire and I shall sate it!”
Faith said something else at that point, but since even the twenty-first century version would have scorched a sailor’s ears we won’t reproduce it – suffice it to say that, whatever it was that she screamed, Spear wasn’t listening.
So Faith left John Murray Spear, left him standing bathed in the electric glow of the New Motor, the Divine Device, his Clockwork Jesus, and went out and down the road, consumed with frustration and a self-righteous fury, into the small hamlet of saltbox houses and cod fishermen, to tell them a very interesting tale –
We might not know if John Murray Spear actually had his vision of the Association of Electricizers, and we don’t have a clue as to what his creation, the New Motor, even looked like. We haven’t the foggiest idea of how it became active, or even that it did – all this is lost to hazy history, fragmented memories, not even reported in the documents we do possess. But we do know some things: we know, for instance, as stated of Spear’s gathering of his flock, his speaking to the residents of the eastern seaboard, that the Mechanical Messiah, the Holy Contraption, the New Motor was built in Lynn, Massachusetts – and that it was destroyed shortly after its activation by the outraged Christian citizenry of that small hamlet of saltbox houses and cod fishermen.
But the truth really doesn’t have anything to do with this story. All facts do is pin the Hows, Whys, and Whens down a bit – they don’t say anything about what Spear and his followers might have believed, felt about their Mechanical Savior.
This was, after all, a tale about Faith – and how it started the entire endeavor of the New Motor . . . and how she destroyed it.
New York, NY by way of Taos, NM
M. Christian
Vi called it “spaghetti western weather” – a cinematic weather pattern highlighted by periods of near-cliché: dust-devils spinning against a too-blue sky; a solitary mesquite bush; tumbleweeds chasing each other down cracked streets; screen doors knocking open-shut, open-shut in a rhythmic, lazy hot breeze – followed by gusts laced with eye-stinging dust,
dirt, and crisped leaves.
“All it needs –” Vi would say, part of a ritual worked up in the year they’d lived in the tiny trailer, “– is a dog looking for somewhere to die.”
For a couple only three years together, they had a lot of rituals. In more thoughtful moods, Clarette would expound in a tired voice, about how the desert was perfect for such things – beads on a wire of routine that made the heat, the dust, the boredom, tolerable for just one more day. When she was in a less thoughtful mood, she didn’t say anything – she’d just sprawl on their mattress in an old T-shirt and threadbare panties and try to think of anything except for heat, dust, and the boredom.
The electric clock over the stove made a gentle hum, loud if you tuned your ear to it – as Clarette did: a gentle reminder to herself that Vi would be home in just a few minutes. The hum was another of those Indian beads on a wire, a little ritual she did without thinking.
Sometimes, when she did think about it – the hum of the clock, the sun being just so close to the horizon, the obnoxious newscaster on their little B&W TV who always said “we’ll be right back”, all the things that happened just before the truck pulled up, the door opened, the jingle of Vi’s keys in her denim pockets – she called it her ticket.
Because when Vi came home, it was a chance to leave the dry outskirts of Taos, New Mexico – at least for a little while.
The sun was gone, the movie over. A curtain of deep night – as only the desert can make it – was over everything. The moon was gone, new – so the sky was only lit by hard points of starlight. It was a warm night, and for that Clarette was grateful: she didn’t like the desert cold, the way it seemed to cut through her.
Next to her, in their big bed, Vi was radiating sensual heat – her big breasts soft against her back, her strong legs casually draped over hers.