Free Machine by Peter Adolphsen

underneath the eaves, where it attached itself to a gangling thread from a long-since-abandoned spider’s web. Here it hung for just under twenty-four hours, swaying in the warm, lazy, Texan breeze until a balcony door below was pushed open, thus creating a subpressure wind that ripped the soot particles from the grain of sand, oil and cobweb.
    The hand on the balcony door belonged to Clarissa and the scream, which echoed through the trees on the slope a moment later, came from her throat. Its piercing sound stopped me in my tracks as I was playing on the balcony of the neighbouring flat; Iwas nine years old at the time. As I recall, the scream was entirely devoid of any shades of emotion and lasted for as long as she had sufficient breath.
    Afterwards she gasped for air and, apart from her panting, the breeze in the trees was the only sound to be heard. At that moment of near silence Clarissa’s fate was sealed as the soot particles of the ex-heart of the horse were caught by one of her forceful inhalations and sucked into the darkness of her lungs.
    Cancer is both a slow and a fast-moving disease. The second the carcinogenic agent penetrates the healthy cell, it launches a frenzied attack on the double helix of the hereditary genes, but decades can pass before external symptoms manifest themselves. In Clarissa’s case less than one minute passed from when the soot particles hit the inner surface of the bronchiole to when benzapyrene, the carcinogenic agent, buried itself in a specific epithelial cell where it deprogrammed the death of the cell, apoptosis, thus rendering the cell immortal – that is, transforming it into a cancer cell. However, thirty whole years would pass until she was diagnosed with ‘metastasised adenocarcinoma (stage III)’.
    What happened was that she knocked on my doorfor the first time after having been my neighbour for all these years. The restraint was not a sign of hostility; as a rule you rarely greeted your neighbours in Timber Creek Apartments with anything more than a silent nod of the head. I did know who she was though. Miss Sanders, laboratory technician at the Department of Biology; after all we had had adjacent balconies for more than thirty years. Through the spyglass I could see that she was holding her hand over her mouth. I opened the door.
    â€˜I’m not feeling very well. Please would you drive me to the hospital?’ Her voice broke into a cough. A trickle of blood seeped out between her fingers.
    â€˜Just a moment,’ I said and fetched my car keys, and a packet of paper tissues which I handed to her as we walked across the car park. She coughed up more blood, stumbled, and I had to support her. I eased her into the passenger seat. She was bound to stain the upholstery, but I wasn’t bothered about that because, for once, I was doing something motivated by genuine altruism. I was seven months into a depression caused by the realisation of man’s total and inescapable selfishness and I’m aware that pedants might argue that I was only driving my neighbour to the hospital in order to avoid a guiltyconscience and find myself subjected to condemnation by all and sundry, but at that moment these objections were invalid. The car started without any trouble even though it had sat there unused for weeks.
    I drove her to South Austin Hospital at Ben White Boulevard where they asked me to wait. After two hours a nurse appeared and told me that Clarissa Sanders had been admitted, that she (Clarissa) had asked her (the nurse) to thank me and that I was free to go home now.
    A week later there was a knock on my door, and again it was Clarissa. She had now been equipped with an oxygen device which she plugged into a socket, having come inside and accepted my offer of a cup of tea. She opened the apparatus: inside hung two small plastic bottles and she tipped a small amount from each of them into a mouthpiece. Then she closed the machine which began