Demigod of the workshop - son of flame, daughter of iron, Hephaestus' child - you ponder weighty matters, clasping saw and drill and fragile copper wire in fingers stained with blood from glass shards or metal splinters impregnating your flesh, skin marked beneath it all with burns from too-hot tools and under-calculated friction.
Demigod of the workshop, my world will see your slender arms, your fingers, pencil suited, climbing haphazardly over each other as if dying to escape; my world will see your thick-framed glasses and ill-fitting shirt, your sunless smile, and not know, not care that it is you who makes our city run, our fires warm, our lives complete.
I've been hanging out with the robotics club for the past few days. They. Uhm. They get to you, after a while. I think my days as a Snobby Arts Kid who Only Secretly Likes Science are over.
I don't know if the paragraphs are two different pieces, so I don't know if they fit together particularly well. But I wanted to say both, perhaps at the price of some level of elegance or artistry.
2 comments:
I like both paragraphs very much, but it's true...I'm not sure how well they work together. I think it could make an interesting short story, or short short, or flash fiction even, fleshing out the middle between the two paragraphs and keeping them as the beginning/end. You could totally go into some fantasy/mythological type scenario, especially because of how the second paragraph evolves into something quite different and intriguing. That is, if you wanted to continue with this. Which I think you have the potential to do!
Other than that....I don't know you're just fantastic at manipulating words! This was pretty much prose poetry, it was beautifully written. I think I like the first paragraph best. Probably because it works best on its own, while the second paragraph is a bit more confusing since it seems as though there's more of a story behind it that readers aren't aware of. For some reason I'm really quite partial to the phrasing of "under-calculated friction". I really really like that.
I liked this, I just didn't like the line "impregnating your flesh"
and sunless smile which I like in itself as a description, somehow to me didn't seem to fit, I didn't understand why his smile was sunless...
that being said I really like the line "climbing haphazardly over each other as if dying to escape."
and I like the idea in both paragraphs. I think they do fit together, but I agree with Marta that you could add a middle, or a story, and that there does seem to be more to the second paragraph, where the first is a description, the second could almost be an introduction, the demigod's entrance into the world that will only see his surface.
under-calculated friction is a great line.
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