Metal set deep in his nailbeds makes him part machine. Sour and peppery, the tang fills the back of his nose as he props up his face in bunched-up fingers. He squats on disembodied concrete porch steps in a dirt lot. Innocent monsters gaze at his back:

Lorantula, nine-legged with lightbulb underbelly and bottle base eyes

Whatosaur with fire-breathing steel pipe nostrils

Rufus, a birdcage mounted between two penny farthings powered by small electric motors.

With Rufus below him, he is the exalted fabric of the city, a quirky thread. Without Rufus, he is one of the desperate faces that the floating urbane have learned to unsee.

The studio where the creatures were born is now a dirt lot like this one, to be affordable housing that he and Rufus cannot afford.

He breathes in his knuckles, grease in the cracked ovals billowing around him, a shield, identity, swelling to the sky.

Out of the vanishing point of 17^th Street, another creature stutters forth, riding waves of ruptured concrete. Built of green steel congruent with the legs of the 101 overpass, the creature takes one last look at the structure, mistaking it for its mother. It is dragged along the filthy sidewalk, lovingly diverted around piles of hominid refuse, nearly capsizing in the dips of driveways.

Machine-as-man turns his face, still buried in his palms, at this hint of real movement in the theoretical city. The approaching pair puncture the membrane, the creature groaning, chewing the concrete, the sound of fossils being made. He raises two fingers in greeting. Till now she has been all taupe and blur. She sees him and grins. Now she has emerald eyes. Now the creature has a name.

Koliope, a tricorn of aluminum and copper-green, vases for fresh flowers welded on every joint. Koliope falls from a cliff of sidewalk into the dust, is placed alongside Lorantula. The creatures exchange shed molecules, obediently waiting.

She sits on her heels in the dust before him, covers her face with frayed gloves. Fingers splay grandly apart, opening the theater of her eyes. She whispers through her teeth, Is he there?

Lolling his head on cervical gears, he meets the girl from twenty years ago, Lavender, in that face like sand dunes from above. At the thought of what they will begin that day, Lavender gleams through again, an occasional comet, a sun that once sustained, abandoned for LED.

It hurts to disengage the galvanized doubt in his chin, but if Lavender breaks through, so must he. He is, he answers, and his smile is a storm across her sands.

They look at the little house. Their hearts break for it. It dangles from the edge of urbanity, of hurry-up; the surrounding earth-tone cubes bare their glass teeth at it. Born from the lap of despair, it is an earthquake shack, at once exalted and resented. When Earth shook off its human virus a century and some ago, triumphs, treasures, and bodies were killed, but stupid human perseverance was fortified. These little shacks shot out in panicked rows like millions of fish eggs, covering parks and fields, obscuring peace with survival. Perhaps a dozen—that casual quantity of forgotten things—survived the rebuilding of the city.

Now this one-of-dozen quietly contains an imploding life. K lives there.

They don’t know his real name. Lavender calls him K because she likes the shape of the letter. She speaks the letter K when steeling herself to carry on.

They know that right around Christmas K was found straddling the railing of the Golden Gate Bridge. Rufus pointed Machine-as-man up to the viewpoint on the south landing, past the foggy little café, and up onto the walkway. He scolded Rufus but Rufus roared ahead. There they found K, in the first blink of morning, halfway to oblivion. Embarrassed, K stepped back onto the pavement, two feet firm. The pair stopped at K’s two feet. Everyone stared at one another.

Why? asked Machine-as-man.

I wanted to jump onto that ship. K pointed to a freighter a half-mile off, its load a red and blue skyline of unnecessary things. The ship was a mile off, headed to the Port of Oakland.

But it’s gone, said Machine-as-man. You were still over the edge, having long missed your chance.

K shook his head, just waking up. He looked back down to the water and his toes twitched visibly in their old canvas sneakers. It’s been hard for me, K said, to know when I am.

And Machine-as-man reached out and grasped K at the elbow. The grease in his fingertips and the iron under his skin found kin in the steel plate wedged between humerus and ulna, a compulsory foreign body. He looked into K’s eyes, gray windows, and saw K’s anguish. He saw that it was justified. K had caused a death. He let go the elbow but held the eyes and the soul begged for release.

Rufus and Machine-as-man did not pedal away until the back of K set like the moon well beyond the little café. Then they drank espresso for the next hour, to make sure K stayed away.

The next week Lavender left Koliope to the passersby who cooed at and poked her and rushed up to Machine-as-man. I found him!

He looked at her moltenly. Where? Why did you let him go?

She laughed in his face. You know I’ll always find him.

They traveled all afternoon from the fresh wash of the northern shore to the dense south where people were serious. When they got to the dirt lot, Lavender faced the square window in the side of the earthquake shack and threw both arms in the air.

Machine-as-man, on his way to snap her arms back down, saw the hand inside work its way between the curtains and lay itself flat against the glass. The hand regarded them curiously. They stood like pillars and submitted to inspection. The hand tapped each fingertip once against the window, then retreated.

With each appearance more would be revealed. A wrist, an elbow. One day, the back end of his cat.

Today they again stand like pillars and submit to inspection. K draws one curtain to the side, then the other. He displays the shadowed profile that he showed them a few days before. He vanishes but leaves the curtains open. This is different. Lavender and Machine-as-man weave their fingers through the other’s.

Then, the click of a doorknob. The hand is cautious at first, then jets into action. It scrawls firm long lines on the cement stoop. The door slurps the hand back up and shuts.

They wait awhile before they dare to look, and when they approach the stoop, they do so in a wide square to make sure the shack sees them coming. If it spooks, all is lost.

On the stoop, in aqua chalk: the letter K.

OK.

They want to begin immediately but they wait the night. Help is needed, they can’t do everything on their own. And K cannot help, indeed he should not. That would be beside the point. Lavender whispers in the ears of inverted shadows, of light bent around doorways, orders them to go, go. They groan, screech as they rustle and sprout; they are told so often that they do not, are not, matter, that it takes effort to animate. But they will for Lavender. She is the messenger between worlds, delivering news to families beyond, returning with offerings, maintaining the boundary that permits any connection at all.

Machine-as-man watches her conduct from afar. Their friends join the fray of the street, in search of materials. K curls into himself in the center of his shack, waiting for his world to implode.

Two tents catch the first sunglow. The metal creatures keeping watch bask in it, wondering peacefully if it will be their last. Lavender’s tent has three holes in it; a spider has anchored her web in the corner overnight.

In concert, they exit their tents, rub their eyes. Rufus spins a wheel in excitement, rattles the charms dangling from his cage. Koliope, her flowers wilting, remains still. Motion, she believes, will hasten her end.

Lavender is not surprised when she sees the image in her dream glinting in the rising beams of morning. The teetering tower scoffs at gravity, sheets supporting scraps hoisting beams and bumpers and a toaster and bits of a bus stop and even, thoughtfully, tools, and Koliope notices a creature like her, lolling glass eyes from the depths of the pile meeting the nuts and bolts of her own.

Don’t fret, the creature tells her. It will be even better this way.

The shadows whose seismic movements made the mountain of metal stir and shift into the sun, taking form and matter. Lavender and Machine-as-man grin at the polychrome row.

They nod to one another. K is ready. We are ready.

Inside, K senses a band of time and space tense, tense through his being, everything that has and is and will catches its breath. And he realizes: it’s all for him. In spite of all he’s done. Huddled between his knees on the floor, tears finally fall.

The first musical notes of creation sound as those outside choose their pieces. The little shack stands shy and naked, eager to see what it will become.

First, structural things: long and straight, some rusted, proof of their fortitude. The polychrome shadows hammer and weld, build themselves ledges and holds so they might climb to the top of the shack. Once upon the roof, they build skyward. The shack rises, rises, closer to the clouds. Spires of scrap and rebar render the shack for the first time regal. Skyscrapers take notice and throw sun off their windows in warning.

The construction sends a cosmic clamor through the shack, bangs so hard against K’s thoughts that they howl and retreat. K smiles.

The creators survey their structure from the ground. The shack looms with new confidence. They turn toward their treasure pile; now, the fun part. The creature in the center of the pile is now exposed. Koliope sees that it was once magnificent, broken ends of glass ornaments spiraling pink and indigo over its haunches, green copper wire flowing as mane and tail. Koliope shivers as she watches the creators take hold of the creature. The scraps around it tinkle and clack to the ground, and the creature is free. Joint by joint, it is dismantled.

Its glass ornaments are secured above the doorway.

Its mane and tail are woven into necklaces and bracelets.

Its legs and neck are affixed to one wall in the shape of a star.

Its lolling glass eyes are stuck to the tallest spires so that, standing on the roof and looking through them, one might see the City in emerald light and laugh.

Machine-as-man paces round the shack, conducting the creators as they shape the collective vision. Each individual impulse—a memory, a worry, an implausible desire—is soldered, welded, hammered to the shack, making new each sorry, discarded thing.

A piece of a broken pot with a delicate pattern is stuck to the windowsill. K stops trembling.

A blade from a ceiling fan is nailed to the corner of the shack, like a wing. K’s tears slow like drying wax.

Two books missing their covers are placed so they flank the front door, because the story K tells himself needn’t be his only one. His breath steadies, his body warms.

When the pile is nearly down to the dirt, Lavender and Machine-as-man cross the lot to stand before Rufus, Lorantula, Whatosaur, and Koliope. The creatures, having watched the newest in their rank being born and seen the splendor they might be part of, can’t argue now. They stand bravely and offer themselves to their own creators.

Lavender steps closer to Koliope, looks into her eyes. Koliope bows her head just a millimeter, something only Lavender can see. It’s OK, she tells Lavender.

Lavender throws her arms around the metal beast. Not yet, not yet, Lavender says. I need you.

Machine-as-man says as much to the others with a stiff nod and gives Rufus a particular pat.

Lavender does the honors. When the shack is complete, she steps up to the door, stands on the K scratched in blue chalk. She knocks on the door.

Yes, comes a voice from within.

Lavender turns the knob and steps back. K emerges into a slice of sun. The rest gather round him and shepherd him to the side of the shack, where a ladder spirals to the roof. K gazes back and forth, up and down, eating with his eyes every single offering. Instead of down, he is looking up. Machine-as-man trembles quietly within himself, impatient to see K rise, because he no longer worries that he will jump.

K grips the ladder of rake handles and chair legs and signposts and ascends as though pulled from above. He vanishes behind the spires. The creators stare, holding their breath.

They do not see him for many minutes. Then they hear a raucous, heedless joy, like a moon being born. K is at the bow of his shack, looking at the emerald world through green glass eyes, himself a creature, forged from everything, welded with innocence, animated by despair.

Jennifer Blake was raised in Los Angeles but grew up in San Francisco. Her work is inspired by human idiosyncrasies and the belief that cities are characters with souls. With a graduate degree in anthropology from San Francisco State University, she has spent much of her career as an archaeologist, but words are her first obsession. Her work has appeared in The Main Street Rag, The Writing Disorder, and Sky Island Journal.