Some Fortunate Future Day
by Cassandra Clare
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.
“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).