Perpetual Motion

One day Martha's husband Percy had shown her a peculiar thing he had made in his woodshed, a form of mechanical toy that consisted of a hammer on a pivot that was attached to a sort of dynamo.

"Its a perpetual motion machine I invented", he'd told her, proudly.

"But perpetual motion machines don't work", she'd tried to explain to him, commonsensically, which was her way, "They conflict with the law of energy conservation which states that energy cannot be created or destroyed only converted from one form into another".

"Ahh", he'd said, "But this perpetual motion machine converts potential energy, in the form of gravity, into kinetic energy in the form of a falling hammer into electrical energy through the dynamo which powers nothing but the lifting of the hammer back up again so it can fall down again. It converts one form of energy into another form of energy so it doesn't break the law of energy conservation at all and yet, remarkably,it still serves a function".

Then her husband had placed a small drum beneath the hammer and she'd heard it beat the drum.

Ofcourse she hadn't believed in his invention at the time but then she'd murdered him.

It wasn't a spur of the moment decision. She'd been planning to do it for years or at least imagining it; revenge for all the times he had cheated on her with other women and in their bed.

She'd even caught him once. Come home unexpectedly from the hospital and she'd been coming upstairs to tell him when she'd heard him in bed with another woman but she hadn't said anything because you didn't, not in those days.

Some women might have; bolder, braver sort of women, she'd thought, but she wasn't one of those women; she'd stored it away until that moment.

She'd just picked up a hammer from his workbench and brought it down upon his balding old head again and again and again then blamed it upon the boy who always came to mow the lawn.

He'd gone to prison for 30 years. You see no one thought that such a gentle old lady like her could have committed such a terrible and brutal crime, nor that she had the strength in her.

And then that awful machine had started to become a terrible reminder of what she had done; kept banging day after day in the woodshed.

"It must run out of power eventually", she'd thought, "Because perpetual motion machines can't exist".

But it didn't. It kept on drumming for weeks and weeks and then months and months till eventually she'd had to take the hammer and smash it up aswell.

But even then it wouldn't stop drumming, even when it was just a pile of broken, rust covered pieces on the woodshed floor, it kept on and on and on.