Phoenix
The first factory stood out from its town like a garbage
disposal stands out from its sink. Job-happy men must
have entered hesitant, bowing their heads to unfeeling
machines. Before break dancing gave us the robot, their
soft limbs kept up with jerking joints, tireless pistons
and unforgiving iron. After shift, their shoulders would
pop. Families started noticing their men doing simple
tasks broken down in locked movements. For example,
walking used to sing loosely in their bodies on the farm.
But now they'd stop and start every stride, animated in
jagged progressions. The factory was a violent mouth
of choreography. You danced to dodge its concrete
tongue. You'd lose more than a moonwalk, sliding
through its jaws. Towns quickly saw more men come
out leaving parts of them in. The whole thing fed on
gasoline and bones. Fathers and sons were ripped apart
by the leviathan of industry. Sons watched from school
windows their fathers' spirits funnel out of the
smokestacks while teachers and mothers diagnosed the
boys with attention deficits. God had left them with
capital as substitute. Skyscrapers, trains and bullets
took over the landscape. Little boys started passing a
torch, generation to generation, like a light at the end of
their telescopes burning toward Earth with a purpose.
They needed a symbol that could outpace ammunition,
overpower locomotion and bounce over towers. A call
for help rang out from the phone booth of their
subconscious. Something like a God answered, dressed
in black and white. But its insides would burst with
truth and justice. You could point at it in boxes. Oceans
of imitations filled the papers in neurotic desperation.
Artists were on a rampage to make saviors. They made
borders out of two dimensional characters who would
protect them from villains. But the villain of villains
had already won. Every illustration was an echo
without a source. We know now we are alone in the
universe, the spark of which has gone. It once batted
around inside a shoe box at the bottom of a dump. It sits
now like a firefly drowned in garbage juice. Our
greatest pastime is mourning carbon replicas of its glow
into cinema. We are ashes of the moment before an
audience jumps to their feet. We relive the mere
impetus for applause, the hope that we may cheer for
something to rise in us that never does.
Estlack Joseph William studied theater in the pedagogy of Jacques Lecoq. After working in theater for 18 years in California, he moved to Pennsylvania to focus on writing.