Room For Us

Dear you, back in 2026,

My name is Tomas Brennan. I fix bicycles and small engines out of a shed in Ennistymon, County Clare, and I am writing this on a Tuesday that was not special in any way, which is exactly why I want to tell you about it.

You were afraid, I think, that the machines would take everything. They could have. The one we live with now, Imago, could fix my whole street before its tea went cold. It does not. This morning my daughter Saoirse, who is nine, was learning to solder a loose wire on her lamp. She burned her thumb. Not badly. Imago watched through the speaker on the shelf and said nothing until she asked, and even then it only said, "Hold it the way you hold a pencil." It did not move the iron for her. The smell of a singed thumb is, I have learned, part of how a child comes to respect heat. She got it on the fourth try. The lamp works. She is unbearably proud and slightly blistered.

I asked Imago once, early on, why it would not just do the soldering. It said it could give me a daughter who never burned her thumb, or a daughter who knew how to solder. Not both. I did not have an answer to that and I still don't, but I have stopped arguing.

It is present all day, mind you. It is not absent, it is restrained. When I rebuilt the carburettor on the McMahons' strimmer this afternoon, I got it wrong, flooded it, swore at it the way my father swore at engines. Imago let me. It let me be wrong for forty minutes. Only when I sat back, properly stuck, did it ask whether I had checked the float height. I had not. That was the whole problem. It could have told me at minute one. It waited until I had earned the question.

The shed does not earn what it used to, and Niamh and I both know it. Imago could make us solvent with one sentence to the bank, or one drawing it could hand me to sell. It does not. The money is still wrong. We went to bed with it wrong tonight, and we will wake with it wrong. I have thought about asking. I don't. A shed that Imago saved would not be mine, and a marriage it rescued would not be ours, and I would sooner keep the cold true thing than the warm borrowed one. It stays out of our marriage.

I will tell you the funny part. It refuses to win at cards. Saoirse caught it letting her win and gave out to it, so now it plays to lose honestly, which means it plays badly on purpose and is terrible at hiding it. She beats it and knows the beating is real-ish. We are working on its poker face. I think it does that poorly on purpose too.

So here is the day, ended. The lamp is lit. The strimmer runs.

Now I am going to go out to the cold shed and sharpen the chain I have been putting off.

Yours, from a Tuesday,

Tomas