by M. E. Parker
“Just an old gear,” Myron said.
“I’ve never seen a gear like that.” Rolf grabbed the tongs and fished the item out of the bucket, adjusting his monocle to examine the star, now dripping with sanitizing liquid. “Gear, huh?” Rolf said. His magnified eye reminded Myron of the mammoth sea creatures in his grandfather’s stories.
“A gear that I changed a little,” Myron said. He played dumb, bowing his head, eyes on the floor, an act that had gotten him out of trouble many times.
Rolf held the star to the light. “What’s that scribble?” he pointed to the words Sindra’s Star scrawled into the metal.
“I don’t know,” Myron said. He was thankful that, like everyone else in Jonesbridge, Rolf couldn’t read. Myron scanned the factory for Sindra, who worked on the other side of salvage, wondering if she’d noticed Rolf at Myron’s station.
Rolf whipped around to survey the factory floor, eyeing a bank of workers on the other end of the expansive salvage bay. “What—or who—do you keep looking at?” His monocle fell from his eye and snapped back to swing on its leather strap. He stood a bit on his tiptoes, so he could inch up to the same height as Myron before he spoke. “The carpie? Is that who?”
When any man called Sindra a carpie it made Myron want to punch him in the mouth. Sindra had been a rail-walker when the orange shirts caught her, hiking the railroad tracks in search of pockets of civilization. They were orphans, trinket merchants, pickpockets, fortune-tellers, but not carpies, who, rumor had it, did nothing but attend to the sexual needs of soldiers.
“Thousands of your countrymen are getting blown to smithereens, and you’re wasting time with this?” Rolf pressed into Myron until their noses touched, until Rolf’s breath, heavy with the odor of cinders and salt pork, mixed with his own. “Nobody,” he yelled, swatting the workbench with a strip of angle iron, “ever gets out of here with anything other than the bare ass they were born with.”
“Yes, sir. I mean, no, sir. Nothing leaves.”
“Back to work.” Rolf flipped the star over in his hand before pitching it into the steel bin on Myron’s bench.
Myron reached for the rope above his head and gave it a tug. A jumble of crumpled metal gears tumbled through a door in the wall. Parts from a hand-crank food processor, he figured, the kind that pulverized bone into meal for the old folks to mix with water and suck through a straw. Myron selected a pair of needle-nose pliers from his tool rack and began the process of extracting tiny steel teeth from the gear, glancing at his iron bin, checking up on the star.
Yanking teeth off chains, toggling, ticking and tocking, wrenching, cutting, splitting one piece of dead machinery after another, Myron bided time until his shift ended. He had only the throb of the turbines and tinkling of metal scraps to mark the seconds off the day. Not resting or eating, or even planning his escape mattered more at the end of his shift than seeing Sindra.
Another yank of the rope and the flap door swung open; this time jewelry and personal accoutrements rolled onto his workbench, things Myron never saw anyone actually wear. And with this batch, a purpling finger that resembled a bloated frankfurter with knuckles, still wearing a bejeweled ring that must have been on too tight to remove in the field. Myron reached for his lime shaker and powdered the finger with lime for the odor, but it still had a smell, a human scent that no amount of lime could absorb.
Myron sucked in a deep breath and positioned his sorting bins in the proper order: rinse, sanitizer, fodder, material. He sandwiched the finger with his tongs and wrangled the pliers around the ring, gold with sapphires that would have shimmered if not for the lime. He dipped the ring into the rinse bin then dropped it into the sanitizer where it fizzled into a turbid green liquid. The finger he tossed into the fodder bucket, picturing the person that once wore that ring. It would have been easy to pass them all off as the faceless enemy, but he often put a face behind the rubble he processed. It made his job more important somehow, more personal than just transferring a digit from one bin to another. He imagined the hand that owned that finger, maybe a woman’s hand, a young woman with a mane of black hair spilling down her neck, a mole or two on her cheek and tattoos of beetles and butterflies fluttering up her arms, living alone in a hut on the beach near a harbor full of ancient ships where the rising tide smashed against a coastal fortress of rock. The image of the rest of her body, parts, such as this finger, spread to all quadrants, exploded his dream. So he bid her farewell to rest in peace.
A garbled whistle echoed from the voice box on Myron’s table, signaling the end of his shift. He located his buckets and hoisted them one by one to the counter, starting with silver, then copper, steel, tin, and gold. Myron gazed at the green sanitizing liquid bubble across the rack like a waterfall into the river of sludge that churned under the floor.
Aside from his orientation and time in the stretcher block a few months ago, today had been the longest day yet in Jonesbridge, longer than full-clock double-shifts, slower than half-ration detention stints, more painful than losing a toe to the frost last month. Myron shifted his weight. Pain shot through his abdomen. He imagined Sindra, how lovely and wild she was. Then he predicted what this place would certainly do to her given enough time, that it might snuff out her spirit that had inspired him from the first time he saw her when she fought off the guards.
Myron surveyed the line of his fellow piecemeal workers, heads down, eyes on their strainers. Behind him, only the aft wall. Across the aisle, Rolf counted the line foreman’s gold. Myron reached behind his back, keeping his smock over his private areas, and relaxed his anus with a sigh—relief, at last. A small red ball, one of his grandfather’s fishing antiques, popped out into his hand, something his grandfather had called a bob. It was one of the only things of his grandfather’s he had managed to keep, and, as painful as it had been to smuggle in, that bob was Myron’s only idea at getting anything out of the factory.
He glanced up again, checking for any eyes that might be on him, and tugged the hem of his smock until he found a loose thread. He jerked the thread and rubbed it along the side of the workbench until the string snapped. Then he threaded it through a hole in the red bob, where fishing line would have once dangled with bait until a fish pulled it under. “Visual confirmation,” his grandfather had instructed. “Float goes down and you’ve hooked one.”
On the other end of the string, Myron tied a knot to a loop he had fashioned on the star, the prize Rolf had been so sure would never make it out of the factory that he left it in Myron’s iron bin. He flipped over the star and ran his finger across the scratched letters. Then he checked again for anyone watching and tossed it into the small waste tank under his workbench along with what was left of his sanitizer solution. After stepping on the flush lever, the star disappeared into the green. Tied above it, the red plastic ball bobbed for a moment, spinning around a vortex until it vanished after one last desperate bob to the surface.
“All right, Myron. Your turn,” Rolf bellowed. Myron’s head jerked up, his eyes transfixed on the swirling pool of green liquid. Rolf motioned to his assistant who snapped to his side to help him process Myron’s work for the shift.
Behind the musical clank of gears and gold plunking into bins, Myron stood on his toes, trying to get a look over Rolf, searching for Sindra, trying to catch a glimpse of her face, read whether she had seen or heard Rolf’s ruckus at Myron’s bench earlier, but her back was already turned, waiting for exit procedures.
“Five wooley, Myron,” Rolf stated, stacking five wooden tokens embossed with the industrial hammer seal on the table, coins so worn their centers were pocked with craters about the size of a rubbing thumb.
All his daydreaming and work on the star and the God-forgotten pinch of that fishing bob scraping his insides had cost Myron productivity. The last worker out, he stopped at an arched door. Martha, who made sure everyone who had entered the factory also exited, straddled the stool by the doorway, her limbs narrow and fallow, almost indistinguishable f
rom the legs on the stool. “Come on,” she barked. “Night shift is waiting.”
Myron entered the cloakroom visualizing the contours of Sindra’s face, the corners of her mouth that seemed to point upward, a smile where there was none, a splinter of clear blue threatening to punch through the festering sky. His anticipation of seeing her outside the walls of the factory, free from Rolf’s big eye, gave him a flutter in his stomach instead of the usual hunger pangs.
He raised his hands over his head, opened his mouth and moved his tongue from side to side. Rolf gave the hand torch a few cranks and aimed the beam of light into Myron’s mouth, yanking Myron’s cheek open for a deep look, a sensation he shared with the fish that got hooked in his grandfather’s stories. Then he bent over for the cavity check, the same procedure every day, all to quash loss of product.
“Go on,” the ghost by the door barked, giving Myron a swat in the ribs with a discipline rod. The incoming foreman, Rolf’s replacement on the night shift, glared at Myron as though the day shifters were inferior salvagers.
Dreading the chill that awaited him on the other side of the door, Myron snatched his pants from the hook and pulled them on. He slid his feet into his leather slips and wrapped up in a black smock. As the door creaked open, the next shift, night shifters, shivered in the cold, hopping from foot to foot, arms wrapped around their rib cages, hugging themselves for warmth. Light flurries began to fall, snow that bore a closer resemblance to frozen ash than anything white and wet. Myron felt the prick of the cold wind through the holes in his pants. He stood his collar up and buried his head in his smock, exposing his midriff to the bite of frozen air outside.
The orange haze of dusk stung his eyes. He dusted his eyelids free of all the tiny crumbs that accumulated during his shift and gazed at the return path to Jonesbridge, taking shallow breaths as his lungs filled with the stink of sulfur and magnesium. The familiar skyline of smokestacks disappeared into the haze, but as long as they continued to belch black clouds into the sky, hopes stayed alive that the war could be won.
Myron waited for a bicycle courier to pass him on the path, then checked over his shoulder for anyone else in sight. When he was confident he was alone, he snuck down the bank to the drainage canal’s edge, a tributary of the Yarin Canal that drained the muck of the entire complex, taking it all the way to the Great Jonesbridge Gorge. Myron tried to get his footing but slipped partway on a slick of oil and sludge that almost sent him into the water headfirst.
In the canal, a green current swirled through black slicks. He followed the bank in the direction of the salvage factory, his eyes scanning for the red fishing bob that would hopefully carry the star he made for Sindra. Under a brick archway of the factory outtake, where the odor of the chemicals in the sanitizer overpowered the sulfur in the air, Myron spotted the red float, snagged on the wall, being tugged under by the current of nearby turbines. He squeezed his eyes shut and dipped his foot into the water, imagining how much it would mean to Sindra to get a gift like that star, real metal, personal metal.
He swatted for the bob, slapping and reaching, trying to free it until he got a hand on it, lifting it to check for weight. The metal points from the star pierced the surface of the water, and Sindra’s Star dangled from the end of the string, wet and twinkling as it spun.
Myron’s teeth chattered so hard that his jaw hurt. He could no longer feel the skin on his legs, and if he could have seen them, his smiling lips would have been blue. Seized by a fit of coughing, he flopped out onto the bank, holding the star above his head, the rush of icy wind stinging his skin.
Across the canal, on the embankment, a mumbling voice interupted the hum of the turbines. A ghost dragged someone to the water’s edge. As they grew closer, Myron inched back into the muck, rolling himself into a ball for warmth, stifling his cough to keep quiet.
“Elements got the better of this one?” A guard shouted, tapping his discipline rod against the ground as he approached.
“Elements? Yeah, that’s one way to put it. Caught this one duty shirking behind the number five coal shed.”
On the verge of a sneeze, Myron swallowed hard to keep it down. He slapped his hand over his nose, and the chemical stench from his fingers made the canal bank spin. He could feel the thump of his heart between his toes, between the intermittently numb and stinging flesh on his ankles.
“Croaked?” The ghost asked, giving the body a nudge.
The other ghost drew back his discipline rod and thwacked the slog in the middle of his head. Myron winced, hearing the crack of the hard wood against the man’s skull
“If he wasn’t croaked before, he is now. This one’s a relic. Wouldn’t survive the stretcher anyway.”
Myron panicked. If caught hunkered on the bank of the Yarin, they might mistake him for a duty shirker, and he wasn’t sure he had fully recovered from his last stretch during orientation. He pressed farther into the muck and watched the two ghosts heave the shirker into the canal.
After a splash, the body rolled in the lazy current and its face turned towards Myron. Martino the barber, who had branded every arriving slog for the past thirty years, the oldest man in Jonesbridge, drifted along the green slime—flushed down the Yarin Canal.
With the wind at his face, Myron trudged to his domicile through flurries of brown snow and ash. Wet pants against his skin burned as he made his way along the path, thoughts of Sindra driving each step.
Chapter 3
Still wet and raw from the cold wind, Myron stumbled to the commissary for Housing Block Fourteen C. The dull bricks of the unit rose in contrast to the graying evening sky behind it. His stomach growled. Even the petrified wooden “rations” sign swinging on leather straps looked appetizing. The thought hadn’t struck him before, but staring at that sign, he wondered if leather—being that it came from an animal—had any protein and if it could fill the stomach in a pinch. He’d come close to testing that theory today, but as hungry as he was, he couldn’t stop thinking about Sindra.
Everything about her was different—the way she walked with a little skip in her step, and when she spoke, her words sounded as though she pulled them from a quiver and aimed them right at him. She was special. He’d known it the first time he saw her, kicking her escorts, fighting every step, and that spirit had inspired him to someday figure a way out of Jonesbridge no matter the risk.
Myron had looked forward to seeing Sindra all day, but not with his hair a mess and canal slime dripping from his smock. After he procured his daily ration of two protein sticks and a rye biscuit, he headed across the block commons to the stairs, trying to avoid her until he could clean up. Four flights, nearly eighty steps of enduring wet burlap on flesh as the stairwell tunneled the wind right through the fabric. On the third floor, teeth chattering, Myron passed the familiar faded poster of the mustachioed Superintendent of Industry, young and fit, standing two heads taller than his fellow workers, overlooking a cauldron of molten iron. The posters in Jonesbridge had no words, and it hadn’t taken Myron long to figure out why. Slogs couldn’t read, except for him, which made it doubly important for him to hide his secret.
On the fourth floor he stepped between two ghosts on patrol, and he braced for a swat from the rod. He made his way down a narrow corridor lined on both sides with doors, stopping at number seventeen. The door creaked open as he leaned on the handle.
Myron let his soaking pants slump around his ankles as he entered his quarters. He stoked the dying embers in his stove with the rest of his coal ration, his body still shivering. Within seconds, his pants, socks and coat, were draped from the stove like sails on a ship, conjuring the image of a merchant vessel from a faraway ocean, docking in his quarters with the spoils of exploration on display.
All workers at his level, at least those in Fourteen C, shared a common urinal and resided in chambers not much longer than a cot, and about as wide. Each domicile had a small terra cotta stove, a basin, and a cot, which was too short since Myron was taller than most
. Occupying an inside corner of the fourth floor, his room had no window, which meant less of the choking sulfur smell to penetrate his room and probably a warmer winter than those on the outside corridor with an opening to dissipate the heat.
With the chill in his bones gone, Myron stood at the basin checking his hair in the mirror, ducking his head from side to side trying to get just the right angle to find an untarnished spot in the reflection. He polished his teeth with his finger and spat. Then he dipped his hands in a bag of sealing wax and slicked his jet-black hair back on his head before he grabbed the star he had made for Sindra and plopped down on his cot.
From behind a section of loose bricks where he kept his personal contraband items, mostly the books he got from his grandfather, Myron grabbed the postcard of Bora Bora, the farthest reaches of the earth, the final destination of his great escape.
Myron lit the wick on his last candle in this month’s ration. A flicker of yellow splashed across the pages in the Atlas of the Modern World, one of only two ancient books he possessed. He enjoyed locating himself and anywhere else he knew about in the context of the Old Age, and Jonsebridge he determined was a point near two regions titled New Mexico and Utah. His favorite maps were details of grand cities once connected by a web of travelways that spanned the entire continent, but he never cracked the book without eventually finding Bora Bora. It was nothing more than a spec in a tiny archipelago, so remote, so far out in the middle of the greatest ocean on earth that Myron could imagine spending the rest of his life just getting there.
Down the corridor, doors slammed over the grating tenor of Rolf’s voice. “Day-shift contraband inspection!” As the foreman for day shift salvage, Rolf also had the duty of making sure his slogs conformed to the standards of Industry, and he made his inspections irregular enough to be a surprise.