Who is HE?

Another night is done. The sun will be chasing away the comforting darkness all too soon, He thought, with hands in pockets, moving and squirming like snakes or worms digging for something. 
 
The neon lights, from down the way, glitter in the pool of water next to the dumpster. Quiet and dark, the lights either burned out years ago, or broken by the inhabitants seeking refuge from the rest of the city's nightlife.

Lips move, mouthing silent words before lighting a cigarette.

Staring at us like that, is it the hunger?

The young woman slowed when she saw the flame, almost stopping in her path, eyes wide and a slight look of familiarity about her. The woman, hair pulled pack tightly, a long coat, knee length skirt, and walking shoes. 

 Not many peoples come back here. Only thems who are looking for something, that hungers for something. They comes looking for sour things and sweet things. Sometimes they find it, unless it finds them.  Drawing deep on the menthol cigarette. Here is where those Things that can't be found in those well lit parts of town are.  Not like those safe places that the po-lice still pro-tect. The places where child-rens still play and the feeble minded feel safe.

The cigarettes faint reddish glow lights upon a smooth pale white object sticking out of the refuse in the dumpster. A flash of skin half wrapped in plastic, surrounded and partially covered with bottles and used paper napkins from the bar a few doors down.

Safe places,  and well lit places are the playgrounds, my playgrounds. When the childrens laugh and play, the mothers or the babysitters talk into thems little cell-phones, or read thems little books that they think is so funny. They talks on them phones to husbands, friends, or lovers.  No one watches the guardians. No one every 'really' watches, not like I watch.

Bits of half eaten chicken wings still dripping some sort of sauce, lay next to an open hand wrapped in black plastic.  Such pretty red painted nails. You never begged, not like them others. Chicken wings, used napkins, and plastic beer bottles surround the exposed hand. Ah, now you are hungry my dear girl. You never told me you were hungry too.

This hand would never again touch.  Never would that girl need food again. 

The cigarette, burnt down to the filter, drops into the darkly glistening puddle as the walking woman is almost directly ahead. Darkness wraps itself around the smoking man, one hand reaching out, touching the cold flesh amongst the waste, pushing it slightly and covering it with bones and sauce stained paper.  An obvious fear grips the walking woman.

 Did she see the sweet flesh under the garbage?

As Her pace had quickened, and she was past in less than a second.

Memories of pie and the color blue, come flooding into the mans mind. Sweet golden brown apple pie and steaming black coffee. Blue stripes on the plates and the cup.

I know you. I know you from the all-nite diner.

The walking woman is leaving her shift from the City Diner, after a night of serving the bar crowd eggs or pie and keeping the coffee flowing.


Your name is Mary or maybe Martha. So very hard to read  name tags so late at night. So hard to pay attention to the little things, when scanning the room for troublemakers. Drunken and foolish boys that think an "Old Man" is an easy target. How many will fall before they all learn? When will one of them get the upper hand, crushing my bones into gravelly bits inside this wrinkled sack of skin, purpling this skin with dark blood and bruises?

"See you soon, my dear" a whisper of sound trailing off as he turned toward the building and away..

The rays of the morning sun touch the buildings edges at the start of the alleyway,the direction the waitress had come from, as he fades into a stairway through an opened door with a burned out light next to it. A familiar sound of the city refuse truck turning the corner.

It's been fun darling. With one last glance at the resting place for the evenings hunger.

The door closed on well oiled hinges without a sound, the red painted raised numbers on the door read: 456 1/2. 

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Retirement

Click, buzz, whir, sounding a constant reminder of the machine. Load, analyze, process, and repeat. The machine knows only one thing, that simple repetition of action that never seems to end. A monitor, some buttons, and the constant reminder of the machine: click, buzz, whir.

Sometimes though, it does need human intervention, such as when the loading arms get overzealous in picking up product. A simple matter of clicking the buttons and reversing the loading arm, once, twice, and it usually is free of any of the material jamming it. Nothing more irritating than having to call the maintenance crew to clear it manually. No one wants to call maintenance.

If your machine is stopped for more than a few minutes you get your pay docked. Joe Jackson, who ran the machine down the hall, had his machine lock up on him once. It took twelve hours before they were able to clear it and get it running again, he worked that malfunction off his check for nearly two months. Luckily the company leases our homes to us, as long as we are employed by the Braxton Food companies we get credit to lease a home. These are not mansions in any sense of the word, but they are pretty damned decent considering the small amount of work we do, most of us are grateful, and if we are not -- we keep it to ourselves. It is an easy life, just monitor the machines, oversee loading of the trucks, and some people get to work in the office, taking orders, filing invoices, and the other things people do when they get to sit at a desk and gaze out the windows. There are no windows in the processing areas of the factory.

No one actually touches the food, it is the pinnacle of safety and cleanliness. If it weren't for the pallets of Braxton Brand Premium Meals being loaded onto the trucks, you would never know food was packed here. No smells other than ozone the electric forklifts made ever sullied this workplace. Other than the days that Mary Jimenez makes that awful soup of hers, everyone seems to love it as they line up to get a bowl, but I can't stand the smell. My food is lightly scented a good mix of grain and vegetables, easy to carry, and preferably can be eaten hot or cold, like the Braxton Brand Meals. It says so right on the box; "Braxton Brand Premium Meals are delicious hot or cold, eaten with your favorite drinks or...", I only wish I could afford to eat those meals more often. The stores do not carry them, as one meal can cost as much as anyone I know makes in a week, but you can special order the delicious meals from the offices, in all the wonderful flavors.  

Click, buzz, whir With only a few years left till I retire, the last thing I want to do is impede the function of the machine. Hundreds of times a day the machine repeats that series of actions, click, buzz, and whir, over and over again. With nothing in the machine booth with me other than the flat monitor that scrolls data about the pressure of the hydraulics, and counts the product that is packaged both during my shift and the running count. I can process up to six hundred times a day, I have no idea how many meals that is, just the amount of times my machine cycles.

Two million eight hundred thousand eight thousand and six. The total number of times this machine has cycled in the last fifteen years, since the time my father sat here in front of a brand new machine, to this day as I sit here hoping the machine does not clog. Not today, not so close to retirement. I would like to get that piece of cake, that cake they from the head office send down whenever a loyal employee retires from this life of work. I look forward to that day, the cake looks so damned delicious, the layers of sweet yellow cake with dark gooey frosting. Only the retiree gets cake, and I can see why -- no cake has ever looked so delicious, no other cake could mean as much then if you only get it once.

Jerry was the first person I had ever heard of that didn't get cake. Jerry Mansfield ran the machine next to me for five years, he had a smell about him, like he took a bath in industrial cleaning fluid, and his face was so sad -- drooping on one side like his face melted from too much heat. What could a person be sad about working an easy job, food always in the stores, and nice little houses to sleep the five hours between shifts. 

My father told me stories of Jerry. Stories from before my father retired and I became the operator. Jerry is the only person I know of, other than maintenance personnel, that have ever gone into the actual machine room. As my father told me, he found the door to the machine rattling one day, and decided to open it and see what was in there. The machine operators booth is smooth metal, with a single desk and a monitor on the wall in front of the desk. Simple and clean, a few buttons on the desk can operate the machine to reverse the actions and clear the jaws. Jerry had this idea, that he could open that door and step inside without anyone ever knowing. He was wrong. Maintenance came and took him out, they took him to the offices and the next day is when he started looking so very sad.

I wonder if it is chocolate, rumor has it that it IS chocolate. I have never had chocolate. I wonder what it takes like, chocolate. If the cake is chocolate, that would be something. In any case it is cake, and I have only had cake a few times, with food being so simple at the store, and I have no idea how to make cake. Not that people don't try to make cake, but most of the "cakes" I have tried really aren't that good. Dry and bitter, or sour and salty, the expression on the faces of the retirees tell me that the cake they get is simply fantastic.

I remember my fathers face before he left for retirement, he ate the cake and the lines smoothed and he smiled really big. His mouth opened to say goodbye, but he was already being led to the elevator. He waved once before the doors shut, and the managers came to give me the key to the machine booth. I hope, no, I know, he is happy now that he is retired from work. "Not a care in the World!", is how the brochure reads in bold letters, with a picture of a REAL sunset on it, little puffy clouds all colored pink and yellow by the great reddish sun. My shift runs during the sunset, not that I would be able to see it from my home, or from the streets and paths that make up our area of the factory complex. High walls keep most of the sunlight from reaching in here, something about it not being healthy or dangerous to have the sun directly on your skin is what they say. My father is now retired, and he can see the sun setting, he can see the sun during the day -- retirement is a wonderful thing.

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