Faulty repair jobs are commonplace now. One chink, one hairline fracture, and that's it. Into the bin without nary a thought toward patching things up. You build for churn and disposability. One day you'll wake up and everything will be zero generation once more because history only repeats when you mind the gap. Work to die and drop to your knees clutching your heart when the soul realises there's a better staircase to climb down.
The rest of the warehouse is quiet, the bustling hustle a memory so drunk in the past. Cut, sliced off to produce more units from fewer hands. He punches his card and turns off the lights. Last one out, again.
Once such a happy kid, now just another agelast spat out by the machine of industry. Wake up, eat, go to work, come back home, sleep and turn over in a puddle of sweat. Don't wash or rinse, just repeat. Day in, day out. It's all the same. Lunch is nothing more than two slices of bread with a flattened slice of bread in between. His mother used to call it a jam sandwich. His other mother called her with the back of her hand. What little bit of light left in him flickered out that night when his mothers tried to one up each other. There's only so much road you can race before you hit the wall.
He'd seen this before. Not with the same materials, mind. But definitely of the same frenetic, "that'll do" attitude. The scattershot bricolage of pig brains and matted pubic hair smeared across the wall. A lover's spat gone awry. The heat. The passion. Oh, the passion of the fruit. Like a student play and the teachers spiked the punch with their regrets and couldawouldashouldas. A vicious poison indeed.
The trail was cold, the chapters repeating. One turn against the syzygy. An eclipse that runs off with a passing comet just to throw the alignment out.
Everything was different while staying the same. He admired the work, but found the artistic merit lacking. His apartment was covered floor to ceiling in all the news clippings he could find on the case. Slow work days, and there were plenty of them, meant combing through websites and a constant feed of three 24-hour news channels. Each detail worked and reworked. Studied, broken down. It was intimate. He knew every bit, every hairy detail. If you had the time he'd reenact each scene, perfectly.
The warehouse shuts down at the end of the month.
Do you think they franchise sprees?
Written on Wednesday, 15 May 2013