Free-Wrench, no. 1 Read Free

inspiration and creation above all else, and it
showed in everything they did. Elegant columns and intricate
statuary adorned even modest homes. The streetlights were cast and
polished with the same care as a set of fine silverware and gleamed
in the sun.
    She passed through the flowered trellis of
her family’s tastefully landscaped front garden just as the family
was gathering around the breakfast table. As they did every
morning, her mother and siblings took their breakfast on the
family’s sun porch where they could enjoy the sights and aromas of
their front garden in the warmth of the rising sun. Amanita quickly
took a seat. Already at the table were her fraternal twin sister,
Analita, and her younger brother, Joshua. Both were dressed in
their pajamas, more accustomed to starting their day with the
sunrise than finishing it, as Nita did.
    “Late again, Miss Amanita. Trouble at the
steamworks?” asked Marissa, the cook. She was a matronly older
woman with a frizz of silver hair barely tamed by a white bonnet.
In her hand she held a basket of freshly baked rolls, which she
added to a table already set with fine china and an assortment of
fruits, pastries, and hot cereal.
    “Nothing much. A chunk of scale from boiler
three broke free and jammed one of the secondary manifolds. The
whole thing nearly blew its top, but a few of us managed to release
the pressure. Just got a bit messy is all,” Nita explained as she
buttered herself a roll.
    “Nothing much,” said her mother, Gloria, with
a cluck of her tongue. “It sounds awfully dangerous to me.”
    The matriarch of the Graus clan, Gloria Graus
looked very much the part. Time had done little to fade her beauty
over the years. What few lines and wrinkles had found their way
into her features served only to underscore her elegance. She fixed
her hair, striped with its first strands of silver, pulled back
into a tight bun, and even at the breakfast table she wore a gown,
petticoat, and satin gloves. There was a telling weariness to her,
though, a bone-deep fatigue that was out of place so early in the
morning.
    “Don’t worry so much, Mother. It isn’t
anything we haven’t been trained for. I just had to put the old
monkey-toe to use.”
    “You know, Miss Barken from the art academy
was just talking about opening their doors again. I could have your
father talk to her about reserving a spot for you.”
    “Mother, we’ve been through this…”
    “I just feel that you deserve a chance to
have a calling in life that is a bit more—”
    Nita rolled her eyes and completed the
sentence: “Proper? Ladylike? Acceptable?”
    “I was going to say artistic.”
    Amanita’s mother had never truly approved of
her daughter’s decision to take a job at the steamworks. It was
only right, in the eyes of most Calderans, to devote one’s life to
the creation of objects of beauty. No one held this view closer to
their hearts than the Graus clan. Over the generations, Nita’s
family had produced some of the finest sculptors, musicians, and
painters in all of Caldera. That tradition continued to this day.
Each of Nita’s siblings had found a suitably creative calling.
    Analita was a dancer and artist’s model.
Though she shared a birthday with Nita, the pair were anything but
identical. Nita, quite lovely in her own right, seemed terribly
plain beside Lita. Beside Lita a goddess would be plain.
Tall and slim with dancer’s legs, Lita had a flawless face and a
rhythmic grace that showed in her every motion. Her eyes were ice
blue, a match for her mother’s, and she took the time each morning
to paint her fingernails, color her lips, pull up her hair, and
otherwise put an artist’s touch to her delicate features. Nita
wasn’t quite as tall, wasn’t quite as well proportioned, and wasn’t
quite as graceful. Her eyes were her father’s brown, her hair a
deep brown rather than her sister’s glorious black. In short, she
wasn’t quite Lita. In her youth it had been a