Bird-Girl Builds a Machine
ShortStory 2,940 words Recommended by 2 award/anthology sources
"Your mother spends every evening working on her machine. It looks like no other machine you’ve seen. A hunk of metal on the ground, with wires stringing each section to the next. Like the inside of a giant robot’s belly, if someone cut it open to expose the raw gape of its innards."
Quasar links out; the story lives on Clarkesworld, where the author gets the click.