1. Parallel lives


    Date: 8/15/2016, Categories: Love Stories, Author: Alexandra_A, Rating: 7, Source: LushStories

    History records that a certain celebrated eighteenth century inventor and engineer was an only child. However, recent cataloging of previously unseen family documents has unearthed a hitherto unknown diary of one who appears to be his younger sister. Though written in a complex secret cypher, I have successfully de-coded several tracts, the most illuminating of which appears below. January 14th, 1784 After turning down the oil lamps, I trod carefully across my makeshift workshop, eager anticipation beating in my breast, brass turnings skitterIng across the bare blackened boards. The wait had been torturous, yet the moment fast approached. Though my attic room is sufficiently distant from the house's busy centre, I had postponed the trial till now, held back testing my apparatus till I could be certain I had total solitude. The coldness, dankness, and darkness of a midwinter's Sunday evening should form no deterrent for a devout household such as this, and so it transpired: without exception, and as usual, the entire household - family and servants alike - were attending the kirk. Unexceptionally, and as usual, I was left alone. By the flickering light, the mechanism gleamed a pale ghostly yellow. Though simple enough in its construction and design, each part was painstakingly wrought, accurate beyond measure, an apposite reflection of my family's scientific and engineering renown. If only my brother could have seen it! I fancied I could hear the excitement fizzing, bubbling ...
    in his throat, threatening to burst through his famous hushed brogue even as he gazed in wonder. 'Oh, Jane! What a marvel you have created!' Yet he would surely never utter those words and thus must never see it. Never even know of it. The shame would be more than I could stand, more than he could possibly bear, outstripping even the shame I already bring to our lineage. James is a genius. His work with steam engines has brought him great fame and even greater fortune. Taking an inefficient, barely serviceable contraption as a starting point, he has revolutionised the mining industry, created a pumping engine of greater efficiency than anyone would have believed. They are instruments of incredible beauty, of almost God-like power. Meanwhile, he has reinvented himself, become refined and upright, a man who can step into the loftiest social circles and be amongst equals. The love I feel for him is barely believable; a passion almost beyond decency. I, on the other hand, though blessed with a mind as quick, insightful and malleable as his, am disfigured, twisted, a creature unfit to be seen. Though shown a degree of kindness and patience by my God-fearing parents, I have been locked away from humanity, hidden in this cold corner of their otherwise welcoming home, an oddity, an embarrassment. Invisible. Unwanted. Unloved. To keep me quiet, unobtrusively occupied, they allow me books, tools, materials, indeed almost all I desire, though the thing I desire the most they would never ...
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