Time's Mistress
marvelling at Waterhouse’s skill. She was exactly as he remembered, though of course when he talked to her and fussed around her she could not answer him. The only words were in his memory, but better that than all of her living there.
    He slipped one of the disks into the slot at the back of her neck and slowly, tenderly, wound the mechanism. It was almost erotic. There was something heady and powerful about his touch bringing life. She walked away from him and sat in the chair beside the window, the failing light adding a golden aspect to her wax flesh as she simply sat, content to soak up the heat. Josiah had seen Annabel Leigh in the same seat more times than he could remember. Sometimes she would knit, other times she would read one of those Penny Dreadfuls and gasp at something on the page, but most often she would simply sit, tilt her head back and savour the sun’s kiss.
    For a moment it was as though she had never gone.
    He sat down beside her and told his Annabel Leigh everything she had missed over the six years she had been lost to him.
    He changed the disk so that she might walk through to the kitchen to make tea, her favourite porcelain laid out precisely so, so that every movement she made was inch perfect. There wasn’t a rattle as she filled the tea pot and carried the tray through to library. They sat together a while in silence, Josiah pretending to drink, Annabel Leigh not. He thought about taking her outside, it had been so long since they had gone for a long stroll through Hyde Park in the rain, and there was nothing more romantic than that; walking side by side, looking up to catch the fat raindrops with their open mouths and laughing.
    Tomorrow, perhaps. After all, they had a new life time to share together. There was no hurry to do it all again in a single day.
    He lost all track of time, revelling in having her back. An hour before dawn he noticed her beginning to slow, her movements becoming jerky and imprecise as the mechanism at her heart wore down. It was like watching her die, slowly and painfully.
    Twelve hours.
    It brought it all back to him, the ravages of the Cholera, the dread he had felt knowing death would come to steal her away from him. All of it, brought back to him in the twelfth hour as he sat alone in the front room.
    “Be careful what you wish for,” he told the wax face of his love, his heart breaking. There was no distance this time, no shock or protection. She was there, in front of him, and he could see the gears losing their tension and the half-life draining out of her.
    He sat alone because he couldn’t bear to watch the final hour.
    He picked up his precious Annabel Leigh and carried her to the cupboard beneath the stairs, hiding her away so that he could grieve alone. Death was not something he wanted to share with her. He could not face the grief of losing her again and again and again. It did not matter that this time all Josiah Bloome had to do was wind the mechanism to bring her back. All that meant was that he could re-experience the pain of losing her all over again.
    He thought of lying beside her in bed, sleeping only to wake to her cold body, the life wound down to nothing. It chilled him to the core. Having to lean over and wind life back into her stiff limbs, to bring her back again and again from beyond the mortal coil. Who could have known that gears and cogs could so easily become the mechanisms of grief?
    There was no beauty in lies, he thought, looking at the face of the woman he loved, at the ghost he had brought so hungrily into his own house, and slowly losing his mind as day after day he lost the one thing he had truly loved in life. To lose her once was tragic, to lose her every day, torture. No, there was no beauty, there was only pain. All the horrors of war paled beside the repeated grief he felt watching his wife die every day, like clockwork.
    ***

Ashes
    When I was twenty-seven I tried to imagine what it would be like to be fifty, to have
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