Memory Labors On
She will take a bus today; it will be an old bus on a long
taken journey. The factory is a derelict shell. She cannot smell
the dereliction, she smells the walls and the ranks of machines
that thunder and hiss inside a grey vault of printed moments.
Her hands remember what to do, the machine whines and spins
as she tends.
The foreman is a watchful bastard, anger fills her throat
as he glares through an oily interface in her mind.
The boss is a mustache in a suit that never speaks to the
workers. She does not recall taking the bus home.
Around teatime threads of light arrow down from a domed
ceiling introducing her once again to an upholstered moment.
She reaches out for the mechanical cat. It is its birthday and
the woman who interlopes into her present hovers over her
as she drinks her tea. Small talk wanders around the room,
it cannot hear itself anymore. The cat purrs her to sleep again.
Two women talk in a corridor, discuss deterioration or
improvement - there are signs of both. Progress in any
restorative sense is not mentioned. It is decided not tell her
who she is anymore, it only confuses the operators of
wrecking balls, the driver of the bus, the long dead foreman,.
Soon another workday will chug to a stop at her doorstep
then depart for places only pictured in monochrome archives.
Inside the buffet and pitch of a city bus breadwinners dream
of jam for evening supper.
Copyright © Eric Ashford | Year Posted 2021
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