Short Story
Some Fortunate Future Day
- by Cassandra Clare
- in Steampunk! An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories, edited by Gavin J. Grant and Kelly Link (Candlewick Press, October 2011)
In a war-torn, fable-like, Victorian kind of world, Rose’s father goes off to war leaving her various inventions: talking dolls, a garden robot, a mechanical cook, and a time device that comes in handy when a wounded soldier makes his way to her doorstep.
When he said that, he looked at Rose’s mother’s portrait, hanging over their fireplace mantel. He had invented his time device only a few short months after she had died. It had always been one of his greatest regrets in life, though Rose sometimes wondered whether he could have invented it at all without the all-consuming power of grief to drive him. Most of his other inventions did not work nearly as well. The garden robot often digs up flowers instead of weeds. The mechanical cook can make only one kind of soup. And the talking dolls never tell Rose what she wants to hear.
