Content warning: Dismemberment, mild sexual reference (mating animals).
My name is Josiah Moulder. I have lived in this town for most of my life, though I am still quite young. My hair is brown and my eyes are blue. I am fairly tall, which makes it hard for me to fit into my rather cramped house. I work at the new factory. It has not been very long at all since the factory arrived in town, but its impact has been immense. The town used to be dying; now it is gaining new life, as people flock (occasionally back into vacated, long-empty homes they have reclaimed) from the bigger cities where they failed to find work. Of all the new and shiny things that the factory makes, the most impressive are the changes to the town and the people in it. I rarely recognize anyone anymore; it seems that the number of faces increases faster than I can learn to recognize them. And they all use things that the factory has made; new clothes, new hats, and new automobiles to drive on dirt roads that, soon enough, will be made into tarmac streets glistening with asphalt and novelty.
The factory makes many things, and many people are involved in the making of those many things. But the factory does not only assemble things. It also disassembles them. And I am one of the few involved in the disassembly process.
I was an early hire, in an early part of the factory. The factory didn’t create as much then, but it still undid things. It might have been the first thing they did; I didn’t pay much attention to the other parts of the factory, then. I was too engrossed by what I had found in my section; the huge, plain warehouse-like building which was marked “Manual Disassembly”, with a small sign that was somehow faded despite the fact that the factory had just been built.
I was hired on a Friday, as a temporary worker to replace someone who hadn’t come to work, with the understanding that if that person didn’t show up on Monday I would take his job— and his paycheck. I was short on money at the time, and not of fixed employment, but even if I had not been broke or jobless it was a good enough offer to take, considering the pay, even if there were certain oddities associated with the factory that made one rather suspicious of it. Half the town kept whatever windows they had in that direction open at night, lidless eyes ever gleaming starlit in empty vigilance for the sake of unspoken fears as yet unknown, not yet given fixed form in thought, word, or preparation.
The other half of the town kept their windows closed to it, even in the day, and generally made an effort to pretend that it wasn’t there. Those people were usually the ones that worked there. I stopped looking at it, too, once I started to spend more time there. It is an ugly building. It is an ugly place. But I have very little to tell you about most of the factory. The entirety of my time there was spent in a single room in a single section, with a single sign and a single huge machine and a multitude of things, products, to be disassembled. Manually.
I was sent off to work that Friday morning with a light envelope and a heavy handshake from a heavily limping cane-using man that I never saw again, though that was more strange then than it was in later weeks, when the town was almost more of a city. The handshake was very firm, very warm, and very sudden— I felt as if my hand had almost been yanked off of my arm, as when someone jostles your arm about in that irritating way that makes you never want to shake someone’s hand ever again. It was annoying enough that I walked off briskly with a curt nod and didn’t think to ask about the envelope— or, indeed, about my actual job— until he had gone somewhere out of sight. The factory was not very big, then, I must remind you. It was small enough that I was somewhat surprised to be unable to find him, especially given his limping cane-assisted gait. I gave up after about a minute of searching; I thought that, should further instructions be required, I would be easily able to contact someone. While I never did try to contact anyone, I should note that it was more due to the total absence of any visible form of manager or representative. That was, perhaps, harder to hide in the early days of the factory than the later ones; when it was bigger and shinier and bustling and full of people, it was easy to imagine that the manager, or managers, were simply lost somewhere in the mess, doing something important. In the early days it was hard to imagine that there was that much to do. But then, all of us in the early days acted rather odd about the whole place, and even if someone who knew what was going on had been present, I probably would have been the last to know. I did not seek out my coworkers those first few weeks, and probably would have avoided them had I seen them; and later on there was no one I recognized, or for that matter knew who the manager was. Perhaps that man I had seen on that first Friday was our boss; it seemed like the only interactions others had gone through were with letters and workers asked to deliver messages or find potential coworkers.
In that way, I suppose I was marked out from the very beginning. Though I did not think myself fortunate at first, I have come to realize that it was truly a blessing.
The envelope had been labeled “Manual Disassembly” by some crawling scrambling hand. I found my section rather quickly; it was only later that I would have to learn to navigate through the labyrinth of new buildings and warehouses that would swarm idly and industriously stationary around the old core of the factory.
I opened the door, a small scab of metal on an immense wooden structure; it was dark, still and silent inside the building. I fumbled for the switch which I thought must be by the door; I found it after about a minute of groping at the walls, and finally flicked it into position. I heard a whirring noise as a shudder of electricity coursing through cables galvanized the machinery into life, saw the singular factory line with its singular station start moving as the singular lamp overhead coated the room with a dim light. I was the only worker in the building; it would always be so.
The envelope that I had been given contained a short slip of instructions printed small and neatly, like the work of someone who had a neurotic fixation on miniature typewriters. These instructions were simultaneously very precise and very vague, with detailed descriptions of what numbered processes to perform on what labeled things and for how long, though what exactly those processes were, and what those labeled things were, never got mentioned. At least the durations were clear, which would have been helpful if the enormous clock on the far wall had not been broken, and if I could afford a watch.
Process 13 for Part BQ. Process 4 for Parts P and B. Process after process I failed to process, endless parts whose context I was not party to. Looking back, I think it was at that point that I actually started being afraid of the factory. This meaningless message was, I thought, more unsettling than any horrid secret I could have learned about the place.
I threw the envelope to the floor and walked to the door.
And then I walked back to the envelope, to spit on it.
And then I looked to the clock, to the door, to the walls, to the floor and everything else that I could look at without looking at the factory line that was now, in some way, my responsibility to attend to.
And then I shuffled over to it. There was a little button on the side that I also shuffled over to, to attend to it. Nothing on that machine was marked. If it had been, it would likely have been given the same un-names as the Parts and Processes. It was almost a blessing that it remained in meaningful anonymity.
I gritted my teeth. I stopped gritting my teeth and just looked at the thing. I hit the button.
Another whirring noise, deeper but not louder, almost a whisper. From a hatch in the back wall that the machine was connected to came a small section of what at first looked like plumbing.
It was a leg. When it got to the single station on that singular line, where I was sitting on the chair that had been provided so thoughtfully for the sake of my own legs, the machine stopped. So I could do something to the leg, probably.
I prodded it a bit. It felt like a normal leg, which wasn’t exactly any kind of relief, and did not make the situation feel any more normal. I checked the place where it has presumably been detached from its previous owner. It was hairless and pale, and I immediately knew that I had seen— and felt— that texture before, though it was only a few days later that I managed to force myself to acknowledge that I had been looking at enormous patches of scar tissue.
I inspected the out-of-place limb more closely, before finding the tiny “A” and “B” on it, written in what appeared to be ink. I never did find out whether or not it was ink. But that is hardly important.
For the record… I did not have to consult the envelope to know what was expected of me. I never looked at it again after throwing it down. I think it might still be there… but then, I never checked it again.
I clenched the ankle with my right hand and held the knee with my left, and I kind of
pulled
and the leg split into two neat sections without even a pop. I didn’t even need to exert that much force. It just split.
I placed it carefully in the bin beside me, at the end of the line. The line choked itself back into movement and delivered another leg.
This time I checked for a seam, first. I couldn’t find one, nor another inked letter for that matter. I pulled much more gently this time. It slid into two pieces with a gentleness that did not quite displace the sense that I was participating in some incredibly gory dismemberment. It would have been a relief if it had bled. Or would it have? I think so. I hadn’t gotten used to the whole thing at that point. I hadn’t convinced myself that it was some kind of cunning work in plastic yet.
I tried to put it back together. It worked, which is unusual for dismemberments. I felt an incredible relief before I realized I had to tear it apart again.
I tore it apart again. It might have been my imagination, but I thought that the pale, hairless patch looked… redder. Pinker. Rawer.
Scratch that. It definitely wasn’t my imagination. I saw it as clearly as one could see these kinds of things and ignored it. Plastic doesn’t work like that.
I broke many legs that day. I went home and I slept well. I woke up and it was a Saturday, as it very well should have been. I went to the lake and fished. My line was tugged at many times, but I never got anything; I didn’t care, despite my hopes being dashed. I was far too focused on not realizing that Friday had happened.
On Sunday I resolved to not go back. No, it was not a resolution; I simply decided to forget that I had any kind of reason to go there, to that unfamiliar place in which I had never been. Though, if one had asked me, I would have been sure to answer: I am never going back.
I came back Monday. I didn’t even need the money that badly. Sure, I wanted cash, but not that much. If I had been honest with myself, I would have been disgusted with myself; but I convinced myself that it was just the money I needed, just the money, and that I didn’t want to deal with the snap of the not-skin and the cracking of the not-bones.
I occupied myself while working, while butchering, with thinking about something else— namely, the awful mystery of the place. I distracted myself from the horror of what I was doing by thinking about the horror of what I was doing. And despite the strangeness, the impossibility, of what I was doing over and over again on that factory line, or perhaps because of it, the question racing through my mind was not how—
But why?
Why?
Why would anyone need this? What purpose does it serve?
We moved on to hands. Old hands, young hands, thin hands and fat hands and some hands that were harder to pluck apart than others. There was no rhyme or reason to which ones came apart easily and which ones almost seemed to struggle. I wasn’t sure which kind I disliked more.
Faces as blank as mine must have been stared up at me from the conveyor belt. Their eyes seemed to follow me mercilessly as I paced back and forth beside them. But I know that they could not have been following me, because they did not react when I worked my nails into their sockets and plucked their eyes out.
I am not cruel. I put the eyes back in afterwards. And besides, they were only plastic.
They were only plastic, and they broke like plastic when I swung the sledgehammer at them. The occasional splinter fell on the floor, but that was fine, I knew. It was just plastic. If the faces had not been made of plastic, I knew that I would not have been able to break them apart like I did, face after face fracturing into jagged triangles curved like smiles. Lips split into vertical yawns as a rows of noses cracked like delicate seashells do underfoot. And they snapped like plastic, crunched like plastic, felt like plastic. And I did not react because they were not real.
And I swung the hammer down again and again until one splattered and bled. And then I moved to the next one, and they snapped like plastic, crunched like plastic, felt like plastic and bled plastic blood, I thought, and had plastic bones, not real bones, and I felt the handle of the hammer grow slick, from sweat, I hoped, and it slipped a little in my hand and the next face only broke a little bit.
And breaking it a little bit felt worse than breaking it entirely, somehow, because there was still a face there to judge me.
I followed its progress mercilessly as it floated like a grotesque death mask in a river down to the crate at the end of the line.
They say faces reappear in dreams. I have had many faces in my dreams since then. I have had many dreams where I handled many faces and faced many hands, grasping hands, hands pinned like butterflies in a snapshot of writhing, hands more expressive and emotional than the blank faces could be, must be.
The faces were plastic, I thought to myself.
I had an unusual job on Thursday (not that my job was ever usual). I just needed to remove the chests from a bunch of torsos, while the legs were to remain attached to the hips. I made many half-people that day; by the time I was done, they were leaning against the wall two layers thick (there was no crate to put them in). It was hard work, moving so many half-bodies around, so much sprawling dead weight.
When I came back on Friday, they were gone. I didn’t check for footprints by the door. I swear I didn’t.
On Sunday I took apart my own hand. It came apart more easily than I expected, and I dropped some of my fingers onto the floor. One of them rolled underneath the couch and I spent a whole half hour looking for it. I blew the dust off of it before reattaching it.
More hands; what must have been a cacophony of sign language, ignored and dismissed and plucked apart, words and letters mutely getting their fingers torn off like the legs of spiders. Pluck, pluck, pluck, an exercise in manual disassembly.
One of the hands moved, twitched, wiggled. It took me a while to notice it, because I sometimes thought I saw some of the others move as well, and had learned to ignore it. This one was far too… energetic, though, far too demanding to ignore. Nothing odd about that, I thought. They can do it with frog legs, you know. Hook them up to a battery and make them jump and twitch. And I’m sure there’s a lot of static electricity in here, lots of regular electricity in here as well, so we’re bound to get a hand that jumps about a lot occasionally. Such can happen to dead tissue. Not that it was ever alive, I corrected myself. Not that it was tissue, or a piece of an organism. Just plastic, and maybe they had put a machine in it to make it twitch, little wires or something.
I didn’t want to break it apart. But what was I going to do, take it home and water it?
I took it home and watered it.
It twitched, still, occasionally. Maybe it was dying. Maybe I had killed it by picking it like a five-petaled flower, an orchid in flesh tones, from the disassembly line, and I was now left with a mere wilting corpse in a vase. Not that it had ever been properly alive. And plastic flowers never wilt.
When it started to twitch more, to move more, to explore its surroundings like blind beast in a storybook world of braille, I had enough and tore that crawling scrambling hand apart. Not plucked; torn, in two, and thrown in those two pieces across the room.
I found them a few days later. They had partially regrown, with little baby’s fingers jutting out from the rawness that still remained from their wound. Like the arms of broken starfish.
They crawled about unevenly, asymmetrically, long fingers and broad, weathered half-palms dragging the tiny little halves of a baby’s hand behind them, flexing and clenching like a hand relearning how to be a hand, or perhaps learning to be something else. I let them be. I had better things to do.
I was interrupted in my work the next day by the door suddenly opening. Bright sunlight brought tears to my eyes and I could not see what man had barged into my place of work. I fretted; was this the manager returned to ask about the stolen hand? Had I made some other grave mistake?
He was my new coworker, he explained, as my eyes slowly adjusted to the light. I looked at the singular workstation we had. He followed my gaze quizzically.
He wasn’t sure what was going on here, but he needed the job, and had been told that I could show him the ropes. I nodded. And when he wasn’t looking I pulled his head off.
The rest of his body just stood there. I pushed it over; it flopped as it fell. I held the man’s head in my hands and appraised it. A good product, I thought. Oh well.
The scalp was easy enough to tease off; you can find the seam behind the ear, if you know where to look. You can also start at the nape of the neck, but I prefer the ear, because it’s less likely to be hidden by the hair. The rest of the face comes off easily after that; what is left is not quite a bare skull, since there is a thin wrapping of what it not quite skin at every seam, which makes most body parts easy to handle without getting blood everywhere. Unless you break through the wrapping, in which case things can get messy.
I made sure to break his face and jaws into extra small pieces with the sledgehammer. Occasionally, there would be a little fragment of brittle flesh that broke off; it was, after all, just plastic.
For the rest of the body, I followed standard procedures.
When I got home, I found that there were at least three hands; the old ones, still slightly skewed along the axis along which I had ripped them, and a new one, small and pale and frail as that of a newborn child. I wondered how it had come about; had the hands perhaps been tearing off new fingers and growing these— these offspring— from them?
They tapped and drummed on the tables and chairs. I wondered if they were trying to talk to me— but no, they had no interest in me. If they were communicating, it was among themselves.
The two older hands started clasping each other and rolling around.
I looked back at the newborn hand.
Huh. So much for that mystery.
My name is Josiah Moulder. I have lived in this town for many, many years, though I am still quite young, and will be for many years to come. My hair is blond and my eyes are green. I am very tall, but I have no difficulty fitting inside peoples’ houses. I worked at the old factory, before it closed. It has been a long, long time since the factory went under, but the traces of the factory linger still. The town used to be thriving; now it is dying, slowly, as people leave, moving to safer and less eerie places; one day, I will move out with them. They curse the factory, for coming, for closing, for producing what they see as all the town’s problems. I do not curse the factory; I am still eternally grateful.
The factory used to assemble things. I do as well. The factory used to disassemble things. I do as well, and though the townsfolk no longer recognize my faces they curse me for it.
I smile with many teeth.
After all these years, even after the factory and the line I worked at were torn down, I still enjoy my job.
The question which I had always pondered had been—
Why?
Why would anyone need this? What purpose does it serve?
And now I know.
Why not?