Polished Jewels: A Collection of Short Stories and Tall Tales from the Watch City and Beyond

By Professor Cognome

This collection of fine steampunk stories features tales from the Watch City (and related places) in an alternate history timeline based on a New England that never was but should have been! Daring rescues, flights of whimsy, and horrors undreamt of face a motley collection of heroes and rouges, inventors, mill workers, soldiers, and people from all walks of life. Many of the tales included were featured in journals that are now out of print, and others are brand new. As a bonus, readers will find the first chapter of an upcoming short novel based in the world introduced within these pages.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Professor Cognome
• Release date: May 6, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005079109

Professor Cognome

“Professor Cognome” is the nom de plume used by a full-time academic for the writing and publishing of speculative fiction. When not writing or teaching, the Professor enjoys hiking, having good coffee, and learning new things.

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Polished Jewels:

A Collection of Short Stories and Tall Tales

from the Watch City and Beyond.

By Professor Cognome

Distributed by Smashwords.

Collection Copyright 2022 by Professor Cognome

Some of the stories in this collection were published previously.

Copyright information for those works can be found listed below.

The Certainty Of Dawn: A Soldier’s Tale, copyright 2020 by the author

Interrupted Thoughts, copyright 2020 by the author

Lucy, copyright 2018 by the author

Lowell’s Last Chance, copyright 2018 by the author

New Year’s Day, copyright 2016 by the author

Cover art adapted from: Vintage Waltham Open Face Pocket Watch, Size 16, Model 1908, Grade 645, 21 Jewels, Railroad Grade, Circa 1913 Joe Haupt from USA Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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Contents

The Certainty of Dawn: A Soldier’s Tale

Interrupted Thoughts

Lucy

New Year’s Day

Lowell’s Last Chance

Bonus Material: Chapter 1 of Linchpins, a forthcoming short novel

Afterword

About the Author

Contact the Author

The Certainly of Dawn: A Soldier’s Tale

"I don’t believe in Magic, but I know monsters to be real."

-from the journal of Private Benjamin Frakes, Lone survivor of the Battle of the Poconos, Second Civil War, September 22, 1885

I didn’t know much about soldiering, except what Grandfather had taught me.

He called me to see him the day before I was to ship out. He’d been in the Spanish-American war in 1848 and served again, briefly, in the first war with the South — right before Lincoln’s airships ended it.

He was on his porch, sitting in his rocker. He’d landed in it when he got home and, except for milking the cows or refilling his whisky bottle, he’s hardly moved from it all these years.

That day he was puffing his pipe, a trail of blue smoke gently falling down his body. When the vapors reached his knee, they cascaded over his ruined stump, in a ghostly impression of the leg he lost. He walked with a crutch, when he did walk, because he refused a steam-powered prosthetic. His old-soldier’s tenacity was more a part of him than the leg he lost ever was. I respected that.

Look here, Benjamin, he said. War ain’t what it was back in the day. When we fought the rebels, a man stood tall and carried his rife with pride. He carried spare socks in his pack, and an extra knife in his belt, and he was not afraid to use the second any more than he did the first.

He stopped long enough to refill his pipe and light it. I waited in silence. I knew better than to interrupt. When he’d flicked the electric lighter and puffed the acrid smoke to life, he continued.

"That all changed with the last part of the war in ‘63. That’s when the airships joined in. Armed with Gatling’s and TNT on the helpless Confederate soldiers below.

I’d never heard him speak of this before. I caught myself leaning forward, my mouth dry.

Lincoln did what he had to, which was how we ended the first Civil War right quick. It was horrible, his airships flying above like that. I watched them float ahead of us. I saw the southern men die from a distance in Gettysburg. The Ghost Ships, as we called them, rained death down upon them, while we sat high on the hill and waited. Great view from up there. They surrendered after less than twenty minutes. We marched in after to clean up.

But you lost your leg in combat, I said, lamely.

Pushaw!

He turned his head to the side and spat off the porch, as was his habit.

I lost this (here he pointed the stem of his pipe at the leg) because some overzealous fool in one of the death balloons dropped an extra TNT pack and it landed too close to our own lines. ‘Friendly Fire’ they called it. As if there’s anything friendly about getting your limbs blown off, no matter who’s pulling the damned trigger.

One of the cows mooed and Grandfather spat again before he went on.

It’s worse now though. You youngers and this modern warfare. You got those god-forsaken Tesla cannons that can kill a regimen at half a mile or more. Damn deathrays, the paper calls them. That’s what you’re headed for Benjamin.

This much I knew. War these days, if you call it that, was waged by engineers and technicians. Bookish, bespectacled, cowards, who planned death by math, who tweaked a knob here, turned a dial there, and sent men to their maker.

I was no engineer though. Just a hay farmer’s grandson. My father had made a small fortune doing work for the early wireless companies. But unlucky for me, he had gambled much of it away. He and mother had died in a freak airship crash when I was just five. I’d come to live with my grandfather and worked the farm until I was a man. Then I used what was left of my parent’s wealth to fund my education in veterinary school.

But the money ran out before I could complete my course of study. It was therefore necessary for me to live on the farm and keep working on it. This worked out — in a way — as my grandfather needed help.

As a result, the dirt was permanently under my nails and the smell of dried alfalfa rose from my pores. I hated it. I didn’t want to be a farmer, an old-fashioned profession in this new electric Gilded Age. I was young, and I wanted to go and see the world. The hard work had strengthened me though, I had to give it that. I was tall and strong, wiry, not bulky. I could out wrestle and out box anyone in the county.

And so I was a conscript volunteer. Like a lot of other penniless farmer’s sons, I was being paid to take the place of a rich man's heir. At least that would get me off the farm.

I had been assigned to one of the new electric artillery units. But since I was no technician, my job would be to carry a rifle. I was meant to hold my ground and defend the massive Tesla cannons in the off-chance that some men, or worse, one of the Land Ironclads made its way through the perimeter defenses.

You understand me, Benjamin? Grandfather said, bringing me back to the here and now. You understand what I’m saying?

Sure. You’re telling me to watch out.

No, son, he said, looking me dead in the eye. I’m telling you that nothing good will come of this. If you have to, you run.

This didn’t sit well with me. You never would, I said.

No, he agreed. "I wouldn’t have. And now, because I