Slingshot Factory

• Facebook
• Instagram

Andrew Zornoza

__________

ASPX-PIM begins to warm up! ASPX-PIM is the name of our whirring plastic injection machine. Deep inside its belly, manifold heaters let electrical current puddle into heat with measured control. It’s very important for everything ASPX-PIM does to be measured. Excess heat, excess plastic, excess tolerances, and excess dust can lead to ASPX-PIM not performing at its fullest, and at worst, not performing at all.  Right now, all is well with ASPX-PIM. It heats the gallon of plastic pellets disgorged from cardboard boxes. It heats them until reaching an internal temperature of 508 degrees. The plastic, now a molten lake, is then driven by a screw.  When the screw stops, hot plastic jets out a hole into an open mold. A clamping unit briskly takes over, forcing this steel cavity closed. Then the machine sits patiently. Through a system of baffles, cool water courses around the mold. The plastic pellets have been transformed.  The clamps release and a copper rod pokes at the same hole the molten plastic first entered.  With a sassy wiggle, the handle of a slingshot leaves its womb, clattering down a chute, vaulting into the air, and landing into a wheeled cart lined with a gunny sack.

Just a few steps away, Felix minds the cutting machine. Felix is short, with an impressive mustache that sits like a ten dollar brush under his spotted nose. Felix has been here the whole time, but it’s not strange that he has not been noticed. Felix prefers to go unnoticed. Still, he is no wallflower and projects a stolid masculinity with his belted jeans, barrel chest and completely natural mustache. Now he wears a set of oversized asbestos gloves that play against this image. Temporarily, Felix looks a bit like a young son wearing his father’s work gloves to go fetch wood. The oversized gloves are used to push and pull long aluminum rods into place in the cutter machine. Once Felix has maneuvered a rod into place, the cutter bangs into action, compressed air whooshes, the blade moves so fast it cracks rather then buzzes, and the now severed piece of rod tilts into another wheeled cart lined with a gunny sack.

The land of dreams. It’s still there during the daytime, a shadow world biding its time. The bending table seems constructed in that illogical place. Yet stubbornly it insists that it remain on the factory floor. It is the size of a school child’s desk, and all steel, yet burnished with browns and purples from years of use. A large spoked wheel is attached to its side. From this wheel, a landscape of pinion gears, worm gears, and counter gears descend neatly like a mountain range from a mechanical planet. The gears connect to a series of bars under the table, which are then connected to a cryptic arrangement of tabs protruding through slots. The aluminum piece from the cutter is placed in these slots and clipped into place. With a turn of the wheel, the gears translate the insignificant force of Maria, or Louisa, or Benny (if he’s not drunk) into a significant amount of force, enough force to slowly bend the metal into the shape of a body with outstretched arms, an angel with wings of alloy.

At the front of the factory, a tinny radio can be overheard over the din of the industrial machines. Here, a collection of carts filled with parts takes up the spaces between four card tables. Many steps happen at these four card tables. One table is covered with strips of leather and a box of surgical tubing. Maria, Louisa, or Benny (sometimes) use a hole punch to make two openings in each strip of leather. Then they thread a piece of surgical tubing through the leather and toss the completed sling into one of the carts and gunny sacks at the end of the table.

A cereal bowl filled with rubbing alcohol, a five gallon jug of rubbing alcohol, and a small bottle of moisturizer sit waiting at the next station. Next to the cart with the assembled slings is another cart filled with the outstretched arms of aluminum that have been bent into shape. Maria or Louisa (but not Benny), sit here, dip their fingers in the alcohol, and wiggle the surgical tubing onto the ends of aluminum. The fit is quite tight and the alcohol is necessary to get the tubing inserted properly. Maria and Louisa’s hands are cracked and chapped from the drying effect of the alcohol. They use the moisturizer every half hour in a futile effort to keep their hands from looking like the old hands of those who labor.

Now the plastic handle created by the injection machine is pushed over the aluminum body that came from the bending machine.  In between the sides of the handle, an ingenious pocket of space holds ammunition, ten steel balls. The balls are wild, slippery. Most everything else in the factory has been organized, but for some reason these little spheres, polished to a mirror like finish – they find their way everywhere, under the tables, under the steel shelving, on the bathroom floors, out in the parking lot…

ASPX-PIM begs to be acknowledged!  It has been working this whole time. Once it had finished making sixty four handles, its innards were tinkered with to just the mildest beep of protest. Rodrigo removed a tray from the machine’s midsection, the mold for the handles was removed and Rodrigo replaced it with a different mold. Clear plastic pellets were poured into the chimney hopper. Rodrigo is tall and the only one who can lift a box of pellets up to the chimney hopper.  ASPX-PIM now produces the thinnest and most transparent sheets of plastic in the inverted shape of a slingshot. These plastic sheets are brought to the final card table. The assembled slingshot is placed inside these thin, plastic coffins. A piece of cardboard is slipped into two grooves in the plastic packaging. The cardboard shows a picture of a girl with a slingshot fully extended, taking aim at an elk. The elk has a large bullseye behind it.

To the left of the last of the four tables is a box. Sixty-four slingshots, packaged and ready, are stacked into this box. When it’s full, it’s pushed aside for a new, empty box. Boxes line the wire shelving where the radio sits.

The slingshots quietly wait in their square formations, waiting to find homes.

The factory also makes rubber band guns and a basketball hoop meant to be attached to a trash can. 

I’ve left those things out.

There are many things I am leaving out.

I am leaving out fucking you in the parking lot, one of your boots perched on the milk crate. Your heels were worn on the outer side, the rubber gone. Your jacket puddled in a forest of cigarette butts.

I am leaving out bottles of malt liquor, glass pipes.

I am leaving out the dwarf who came to the factory at night. Equipped with a rod of aluminum modified to have a magnet on one end, this little person slithered under the wire shelving to gather all the steel ball balls that spilled all over the factory floor. They then mopped the floors. Cleaned the windows. Dusted the boss’s bowling trophy.

I am leaving out Felix pumping my heart with naloxone.

I am leaving out the gash in Maria’s cheek from a loose piece of aluminum that shot out of the cutting machine.

I am leaving out everything under my breath.

I am leaving out what you said to me.

I am leaving out the headphones and music that kept me alive. Though, in that regard, I suppose the naloxone deserves equal credit.

I am leaving out the rolls, the danishes, the bits of smoked salmon stuffed in Louisa’s pockets every Tuesday when we all chipped in to send her to the all-you-can-eat.

I am leaving out 10% the check cashing store took from me.

I am leaving out soup.

I am leaving out burns. Cigarette burns. Molten plastic burns. Burns from lighters, matches. Electrical burns from the wiring inside ASPX-PIM.

Burns from bleach. Friction burns. Burns from hot aluminum. Burns from the steam radiators. 

I am leaving out years and I am leaving out the city.

I am leaving out the hole in the chain link fence.

Riding the bus every day.

Tall Rodrigo made soup. Chicken soup with carrots and bits of tortilla.  Felix was incapable of cooking.

Leather soles, rawhide laces. Tall heels. Your boots. Bent because of the bent way you walked, like a sailor on a rolling dock.

I am leaving out pictures of the kids. Taped to the sides of the wheeled carts.

I am leaving out the hollow men who lived in tents just past the fence.

The girl who came by to sell flowers. The man who came by to sell corn. The boss’s son home from college.

I am leaving out passing moments, one after the next. I am leaving out the peculiar, stretching sense of time that lived in that place.

I am leaving out the punch-clock. The sound of it. The yellowed timecards that sat in their grey little cubbies.

The graveyard shift. The halogen arc lights on the lot outside. The bright colors of tents past the chainlink fence. The moon.

The night the moon was blotted out by a darkling wing. Slowly and silently it glided overhead. An alien craft from another sphere, a military experiment. Who knows, whispered the tented city. I sat on the loading dock, next to you. We held hands.

I am leaving out showering in the sink. A rusty razor.

I am leaving out Maria asleep. Her head bent against her shoulder, her fingers still working.

I am leaving out these holes in my life.

I am leaving out the shrines. The candles. The chipped face of Guadalupe. The smell of palo santo and marijuana.

All hands on deck! Big order coming in!

I am leaving out the unsteady eye of the boss. The weeds in the parking lot. The giant sunflowers blooming in August.

Watching the rain crash down from the gigantic bay doors of the loading dock.

The fights we carried with us while our fingers moved, our hands did the work.

I am leaving out the iridescent puddles of oil in the parking lot.

Hands. So many hands. Felix’s small hands. Callused at all points. Rigo’s large, flexible hands. Louise’s long nails, two calluses on the thumbs from working the plastic handles. Maria’s short nails, nibbled and raw. Two calluses on the side of her index finger from working the surgical tubing. Benny’s hands, chapped and red. Your hands, on the back of my neck.

The invisible hand.

Your tenderness.

Your violence and desire.

I am leaving out what you wanted and what I couldn’t give you.

I am leaving out what I am.

I have kept these pieces in neat little boxes so I can take them with me.

But where am I going? Am I going to work?

Of course, I am going to make slingshots.

I package them all up. I stack them on the shelves.

I just write it all down. And keep putting things in boxes. I flick on ASPX-PIM.

I am going to work at the slingshot factory.

__________

Andrew Zornoza’s short fiction and essays have appeared in magazines such as Poetry, Bomb, Bookforum, The Quarterly, Confrontation, Gastronomica, Sein Und Werden, and others. He’s the author of the photo-novel Where I Stay (Tarpaulin Sky Press), and he sometimes teaches master’s students in technology design at Parsons University. He is currently writing a long work on different forms of love and interstellar communication systems.

__________

🢠 Back Next 🢡

To learn more about submitting your work to Boudin or applying to McNeese State University’s Creative Writing MFA program, please visit Submissions for details.