There are sounds that ring around the depths of my skull; bells, whistles, and the deafening belches and screetches of overworked dying machinery. Its all there travelling around the pathways and biways of my brain. All of the sounds I would one day escape like I envisioned after every over-sustained fifteen hour day while in a over weary state in my make shift old-long-retired freezer box I turned into a make shift bed. I would massage my throbbing feet in vain just trying to guide even the slightest fragment of pain away, but there was only so much time to fall asleep before we would have to arise and face it all over again. Sleep was the only thing we had to rely on to escape everything, and we all wished, sometimes begging death to come and take us away in our heavenly slumber.
We spent our entire lives there in the box factory, and it was hell, almost as literal as the word could ever mean.
He did not approve of my calling of him Yukon Cornelius, but his scruffy-jolly-looking face and his constant nibling of peppermint sticks could only propel my amusement.
"Hey Yukon, give me your pants!" I'd yell! He'd become hysterical, nostrils flarring like a steam engine suffering from overkill, but I knew he enjoyed it as much as I did.
"Shut the hell up you bludgenor! I'll bust all your teeth out so help me God!!" Furious he'd scream!
"Will you be using your pix axe to do that?!"
He'd let out a loud strange screetching sound which ironically sounded not unlike the painful noises the overworked factory machinery would randomly belch, and in an instance I was dodging an airborn piece of steel pipe or whatever else Yukon could randomly grab at to throw. One night he accidently ripped out a machines control lever in a fit of rage, which wound up sending an entire nights work out the window.
Sometimes goofing around with Yukon is all that would help me get through some of those punishing days, but most of the time I realized just how bleak everything was.
We were born in this crudly built town and it was a terrible place to have to populate. It was a ghost town before it even all failed and came crumbling to pieces. Due to our punishing work schedual we never saw any trace of sunlight. We would leave our cramped buildings and houses before the sun even had a chance to send out its weakest first glow, and we would waddle home in a stagnant state after our shifts while any trace of sunlight was lighting up some strange dream world in some far away distance galaxie. Our town housed all but three street lights, and our powerplant can barely power those. They'd flicker on and off throughout the night, as if taunting us to have a seizure.
And it was during those nights I would talk to Yukon. I told him of my dreams, my sweet dreams where I escaped this crude existance, dropping off the face of the earth where no one could ever find me. I would only tell him these things because I wanted him to come with me, perhaps telling him these secrets could inspire him. But he would hear none of it.
"Thats the most silly thing anyones ever said to me! That is just as-- No, that is even more bleak than this!"
Maybe he was right, but I didn't care if he was, for at least it was a fate of our own choosing.
"People need boxes you know, what would the world be like without boxes? The people out there depend on us!"
"NO one knows were out here! They dont care about us! The world can do without boxes, they dont need them that badly!"
Yukon began laughing uncontrollably at my insane repsonce like a coked-up harpie, and it took him a good five minutes and the failure of his unwatched machine to snap him out of it.
"HOly Polygons!! Now look what you made me do you Himler!" Yukon stomped off to his box shifting aparatus and threw the switch back on, sparking too much stress on the old fragile contraption causing an over stressed chain to snap in half and come swinging faster than the speed of sound, and Cornelius was standing right in its path. I saw it with my own eyes and the sight has been replaying in my mind ever since. The shear speed of the chain took Yukon's head clean off, it happened so fast it took his body a while to even collapse to the floor. We never did find Yukons head that night. We thought maybe it found its way in a box and was shipped out to some other land.
My few other co-workers told me there was no change in me after that night. If they only knew.
Yukon was the only man I ever thought of as a friend, and he was the only one I would ever really speak to. Although he was truly a loner, im sure he felt the very same way about me. I made little to no attempt to communicate with anyone else after that. I just toiled away at my position, punishing myself for what happened to Yukon. This kept up three years until it all finally came caving in on me.
I dropped my roll of duct tape ive been using to make cheap jury-rigged esque repairs to my falling apart machine. It rolled off underneath some old unused machinery sitting at the edge of the large room. Blindly feeling around with my hand on my hands and knees I felt something that ive never felt before. I pulled the curious object out and let out a horrified yelp at the sight. It was Yukon Cornelious's skull. My grimey fingers in his still open mouth. In reaction I flung his head across the room and it landed right into a pile of rotating gears. I can hear his skull getting crushed under the steel, and the sounds of struggling engines filled the room gathering the attention of everybody else. They all stared in awe at the fighting machine in a final battle with itself. The mighteous screetch sounded and a pipe snapped letting out the loudest hissing steam the world has ever seen. More unhealthy sounds and pieces of metal started breaking off. Some pieces flew off like misiles and everyone started running for cover. After seeing a airborn gear catch someone in the neck I decided to flee as fast as I could. And my God I ran, I ran so fast the surroundings around me seemed to collapse.
I escaped the old box factory and the town that night. I travelled for so long I lost all sense of time. I survived off various insects, rain water, tree bark and whatever else my starved body would accept. I tried contemplating what I would do should I find other human life, maybe I would be so alien to them, who knows, I never did find anyone else, instead I lived in an old cave I found and every day I would think about Cornelius and the old factory.. I began to miss that factory. Maybe it was a downright morbid existance, but it was the only one that I understood. I eventually went back to the town only to find the ruins and skeletons of the buildings that once stood. Maybe the whole ship went down that one fateful night... perhaps I should of went down with it.. down with Cornelius whom gave his life to the factory.. he is my hero for that.