home authors guest shorts graphical shorts
“Desperate times call for desperate clocks,” exhorted Clamington, hands on hips, ass tucked in, and eyes gazing forward with a steely resolve that his sense of time was nano-true.
“It’s not that I disagree,” said Clamington’s bronze-forgeman with characteristically putrid drool spindling down from his tawny whiskers and forming a green puddle on the smithy floor, “but there ain’t no such thing as a desperate clock.” The forgman was satisfied that his point was clear and that when he got home, he would be able to look back on his retort with gilt nostalgia. But it was for naught.
Clamington scowled at the forgeman, twitching his eyebrows into the hands of a clock at 10:10. “Don’t play games, forgeman. I bear specs. I demand compliance within a three-micron variance. Time is a punk I’ll slice extra thin. Is that understood?”
The forgeman looked at the floor, defeated. “Yes, sir,” he said.
But once Clamington was gone and the forgeman toiled into the night, melting brass in the glowing cauldron and then creating the bronze alloy by mixing in a touch of just-smelted white hot liquid tin, pouring the admixture into the cog-shaped molds, letting them cool and measuring them with a graduated caliper, he allowed the variances from spec to exceed four microns. That’s right: beyond acceptable variance.
Date Written: March 26, 2003
Author: Ewan Snow
Average Vote: 4.2857