Georgina Bruce is a writer and teacher who currently lives in a shed. She is a big fan of the very short, the very strange, and the very good. Some of her flash fiction can be found at thebeardedlady.wordpress.com.

Nights she’d go flying in her tin pajamas, flapping her arms and kicking her feet, a clanking metal fish in the deep black phosphorescent night sky. Her aeroplane dreams were long hauls over the icing-topped world to the Far East, to the urgent pulsing electric sea of Taiwan. Here were spare parts and wiring, robotic buffers, machines that stripped the pajamas down and fixed them with shiny new rivets at the seams.

She flew everywhere, all over the East, and she got older, and the pajamas flew heavier and slower. They grew rusty, and the rivets came loose. The Taiwanese mechanics said they couldn’t get any more parts; they offered to buy the metal for scrap. But the girl flew on, the pajamas clanking and scraping and talking to gravity.
 
One night in Beijing the girl crash-landed onto a street market, overturning a stall of vegetables, and splitting her tin pajamas at all the seams. She was stunned, not hurt, but she wept at the loss of her flying machine. A young woman helped her gather up the metal and debris, and right the vegetable stall, and pay the vendor. The woman gave the girl a ride on her donkey cart to the mechanics’ quarter.
 
The girl had heard of the Beijing mechanics, of course. It was said they made iron dragons out of steel dogs, silver planes out of tin cans. They were known throughout the east for their skill with metal, their ability to fix broken things, to make mechanical works that were so lifelike they moved by their own free will.
 
The girl put the heap of rusted tin and cogs and wires at the mechanics’ feet. They looked, shook their heads, spat into the earth. They told the girl to sit and gave her hot green tea to sip and hard little biscuits to chew. The girl bit her fingers, waited. She told herself she wouldn’t fly again.
 
The mechanics hammered out the tin and stamped it thin and cleaned the rust from the edges. They melted the metal with blowtorches and smoothed it in their fingers. They curled it round their forearms and round their legs, making curves and soft lines, making a strong back for a noble beast. They built a heart from springs and cogs and wires, which pulsed with mechanical movement. When they wound its spring the lion ran in clockwork circles. They pulled a lever and the lion’s mouth opened in a silent roar. It had long sharp teeth that the men rubbed down with a greasy cloth. They took great care with its rivets and bolts and hinges, so it moved smoothly and shone in the firelight.

The lion padded over to the girl. She stroked it's nose and it pushed back against her hand. She could hear the gentle tick and tock of it's heart.

We'll run then, said the girl. Far and wide.