Bethany Tap

The Machines Were Alive

Most people hated the oil smell, called it nasty. Caustic. In the factory, there was always that scent, like an afterthought, something hiding at the peripheral of the mind’s eye, gone when you’d turn your head. The oil smell was like that: there until you thought about it. Then you weren’t sure you smelled it at all. If it weren’t for the stains on your clothes, for the hours the wives spent trying to coax the grime out of fibers, you could almost forget the oil.

Not that I had a wife or anyone else. Not even a cat since the last one run off. I used to have a one-bedroom apartment where I’d go to sleep. Mostly, I was at the factory. Other than the machines and the cleanliness—my apartment was always plate-licking clean—the two places felt the same at night. Recently, I’d been coming to the factory after hours, on account of my landlord was a real piece of work and I’d had to get myself a contingency plan.

During the day, the factory was loud with them dies shifting and pressing, punching against each other deep in the bellies of oil-hungry machines. People hate the noise, but what did they expect? Manufacturing’s a dirty, noisy business.

Night was different. You could hear everything, which was how I learned the factory’s truth: the machines were alive.

Maybe I was crazy. Crazy for working somewhere I was the only woman with grime on her hands, the only woman who could lift a fifty pound tub of parts and crash them down, the only woman who could get my machines to do exactly as I said. It was like training a dog. Well, more like training a lion. Four of them to be exact: Rose, Dorothy, Sophia, and Blanche.

I might’ve been crazy. But my machines, they worked for me and no one else. Now that I could hear them talking, they told me why: how I was kinder, better’n the rest. How I seen and understood them.

Everyone in my department knew I was something special. My manager, he’d always told me, “Lois, you gotta get someone else trained up. What’ll we do when you go on vacation?” I’d shrug and tell him I’d try and then the time came and I’d end up cutting my vacation short. Not because I cared about my manager, his “production schedule,” or “on-time delivery.” It’s the machines. They missed me when I was gone. I know that now, see? I always came back for them.

Also, I needed the money. My girls knew. They’d seen me sleeping in the catwalk up above Sophia for the last couple weeks. She purred me to sleep, sweeter than a cat, so I didn’t have to think on the apartment, my things lining the side of the road, the new family with their grubby kids getting sticky all over my white walls.

That day before the last one, I got a trainee. I was showing him how to set up my big girl, Sophia. She was a four-die monster, the kind you lean into so your body’d be half in, half out, like you were one of those lost kids about to get tossed in the witch’s stove. I showed New Guy how to put in the dies, where to use the T-handle to tighten, where to put the wedge and hammer, where you need a wrench. I told him everything he’d need to know to make Sophia hum, but him? Well, he was standing back, arms folded across his chest, chin up, looking down his nose at me.

“You got it?”

He shrugged. “Yep.”

“Show me.”

He took the wrench and lurched forward, like it was heavier than he’d thought it’d be. “Can’t believe they only pay eighteen dollars an hour for this shit.”

That afternoon, when my manager was having me write up the incident report, his face all purple, hollering about “how could I let this happen?” when it was that fool kid who got his hand all mangled because he wasn’t speaking nice to Sophia, I said to him, “You’re paying that shithead eighteen dollars an hour?”

He looked at me like I was insane, like money oughta be the furthest thing from my mind at a time like this, when I still had that boy’s blood on my uniform. Funny how the ones that make the most money were the same ones saying it was “inappropriate” to talk about it.

Since he was staring at me all slack-jawed like he’d been struck mute, I went on, “My anniversary’s coming up. Been here near thirty years now.”

His smile was green scum on top of a pond, all that smelly shit lurking beneath. “That’s right, Lois. You’ve been here a long time. Which is why….” He moved that incident report in front of me, tapping the portion where I was supposed to write.

“I make sixteen dollars an hour.” I didn’t lean back. I sat straight and strong. Ready.

My manager met my gaze. He had one acceptable way to handle this situation: apologize and give me my raise. He knew it. I could see that in his eyes, how they regarded me, level and equal. He knew there was no one better’n me. I seen him seeing me and knowing he’d done me wrong. He saw how the world had done me wrong, how everyone and everything had wronged me. Except my four big and beautiful girls.

Then his eyes glazed over with bureaucracy and the script he’d been given. “He’s got a degree. Engineer. They’re training him for the management track.” He held that pen out to me.

I took it and wrote. Not the truth, what I wanted to say, what needed saying, what was oozing out of me like all that oil, but what they wanted me to say. “They” being something much larger and more insidious than my manager, HR, or even the company itself. It was society, maybe humanity. It was the world, all the teeming people with their bodies, their sweat like licorice doused in lighter fluid and their coffee breath, with their cigarette-stained teeth. Worse’n that, it was the ones who lorded over the rest of us with moneyed, straight-and-white smiles. It was them and they were all the same, variations of one theme: men, white men, rich white men. An impenetrable wall of them, straight and white as their goddamn teeth.

When I was done writing, my manager took the paper, looked at it, and said, “I’m gonna have to write you up for this.”

I nodded.

“Three days off. Without pay.”

The room went from hot to cold in an instant, not like someone had kicked the AC on full blast but like we’d been transported to the Arctic, somewhere colorless. A place you could freeze to death. “Three?”

He nodded. “Serious stuff, this. A huge error in judgment, especially for someone with almost thirty years of experience.”

I could’ve kicked myself for getting greedy, for trying to take advantage of the situation, for acting like my sweaty, calculating manager instead of like me: cold, calm, and rational. More like a machine.

Like a machine would, I took the punishment in stride. Maybe a machine would leak a little oil if she weren’t treated right. Maybe I did, too, in the bathroom, legs drawn up on the toilet seat, face held tight against my arm so no one would hear me if they barged in.

At quitting time, I clocked out like always. Then I said, “I gotta take a piss. I’ll lock up,” before going back in, like I’d been doing for going on three weeks.

I sat next to Rose because she was the best listener of the bunch with the best sense of humor. “Rose, what am I gonna do?”

She breathed in and out, the chuckling sound of air whooshing through tubes. I fell asleep against her still warm, slowly cooling body.

The next morning, I tried to creep out before anyone seen me, but one of the first shifters decided to haul his ass in thirty minutes early.

“Why you here so damn early, Lois?”

“Forgot some shit,” I said, moving to go around him.

He held out an arm, blocking my way. “Heard they’s getting cameras in here.” He made a finger twirling gesture to the ceiling. “Guess they found a cot and pillow up in the walkway above Header 18. One of your machines, right?”

Since I’d slept on Rose that night, I hadn’t gone up to check on my stuff. Could he see the panic on my face? He was watching me with knowing eyes, while I looked everywhere but back into those beady browns.

“Figured you oughta know.” He shrugged and moved his arm out the way.

“Thanks,” I mumbled, hurrying past him. If they’d found my shit, it was too late anyway. Shut up and keep your head forward. Leftovers of my father’s voice, memory of him shifting in me like the churn of a sick stomach.

In the parking lot, I sat in my car until the sun was reaching greedy pink fingers across the sky, pulling the night off like a too-hot blanket.

A double tap on my window. My manager’s sweaty face frowned on the other side of the glass.

I shifted the car into reverse and inched my foot off the brake. The car lurched and my manager hopped back from where he’d been leaning against the car, hissing a curse. I continued backing up, shifted into drive, and left.

I pulled into the nearest rest area parking lot and shut my eyes for a bit. My mom used to say everything looks better after a good night’s sleep. She was a good Christian lady who never had a stray thought, let alone feeling. As I drifted off, I imagined the conversation she and I would have now, with me in my fifties and still flailing, and her long dead and buried.

“Mom, I can’t keep this up.”

“Lolo, breathe, baby. Everything will be better in the morning.”

“It is morning.”

“Shhh….”

Then I heard my father’s footsteps, like all this noise had woke him so he was bounding up from hell to set us straight and quiet. His voice boomed.

“You both need to shut up. I’m trying to sleep.” Out of the corner of my eye, I seen his fist closing in.

I woke up, breathing hard. Relief like a cold glass of water poured over my damp face. The sun was high in the sky. I gathered the change from under the car seats and got out to use the facilities and grab some vending machine food.

Everything will be better in the morning had been my mother’s mantra until the morning she woke next to my father’s corpse, puffed and reeking of booze, a half-emptied bottle of sleeping pills still open on his side table.

She called it an accident. Good Christian ladies didn’t have crazy spouses who kill themselves. She couldn’t see the glory in it.

A childhood memory of my father taking me hunting in a forest that’d burned a few years back. Above us, the blackened fingers of the trees, but below was a carpet of white, purple, yellow, and pink. Flowers like at some beloved old granny’s funeral. Like the whole of creation was celebrating one life’s ending, another’s beginning.

Shut up and keep your head forward. Deer in my sights and I’d panicked. That fist closing in again. I shut my eyes and let my thoughts go back to my girls while I sat in the car, eating M&Ms one at a time. What kind of indignities was that eighteen-an-hour, college-educated-engineer boy subjecting them to?

Well, probably wouldn’t’ve been him, given the whole mangled hand thing.

I must’ve took another nap. Woke to my stomach growling, so I drove to the gas station by the factory. Inside, they had one of them roller grills twirling a lone, flaccid hotdog. I grabbed it plus a six-pack of PBR because it was the cheapest piss-beer they had and because the smell reminded me of my dad, in life and, especially, in death.

“You really gon’ charge for this?” I asked the kid behind the register.

“Huh?”

“Food poisoning.” I held up the limp dog.

“Bro, just take it. Five for the beer.”

 I paid him in change. “Gotta smoke?”

He grimaced before digging into his pocket and pulling out a flattened cigarette. I swiped a matchbook off the counter and saluted him on my way out.

After sunset, I drove back to the factory. Didn’t see any new cameras. In the maintenance area, I picked up a misplaced gallon of mineral spirits.

“OSHA violation,” I muttered before walking back to my girls, jug in hand.

Their chatter died down to a whisper as I approached. “Don’t hush up on my account.”

“Where were you today?” Blanche asked.

“We thought you’d been canned,” laughed Dorothy.

“Wait, you weren’t here?” exclaimed Sophia. “So who had their hands inside me?”

We all chuckled.

“Why don’t I take a peek?” I asked Sophia. “I’ll turn you on, see how you look. Make sure they didn’t mess you up.” I was halfway through the six-pack.

“Pace yourself,” said Rose in my mom’s voice.

“Let her be,” said Dorothy in my dad’s voice.

Sophia roared to life. I set her to top speed, keeping the guard off, so I could see the full majesty of her inner workings. The dies punched against each other over and over. Without ear plugs, the sound was deafening.

I hopped down.

“Don’t leave me open like this,” Sophia cried.

I was already climbing the oily ladder up to the catwalk, an unopened beer bottle in each back pocket, the gallon of mineral spirits in my hand. The lid wasn’t on fully. It sloshed as I climbed.

“Don’t get that trash in us!” Dorothy snarled. “It’s highly flammable!”

The first-shift guy hadn’t been bullshitting about them finding my cot and pillow. They were gone.

As if to taunt me, my manager’s face floated across my vision like smoke.

I finished the fifth bottle and slammed the cap of the sixth against the metal railing. The whole top cracked off. I took a sip, tasting the metallic hint of blood against my lips, down my throat. I chuckled, imagining that floating face getting redder and redder until it popped. Oh, I would show him.

“Be careful, Lois,” Blanche scolded.

I fished out the cigarette, stuck it between my lips, and tried to light it, while holding the gallon of spirits and beer bottle.

Below, Sophia’s mouth yawned open. The dies snapped like hungry teeth. I dropped the beer bottle, spraying glass like rice at a wedding in a toxic blessing.

“Watch it!” Rose screamed.

I struck a match and lit the cigarette, inhaling the smell of my childhood: smoke, beer, and blood. “Lookin’ good, Soph. Whoever set you up took good care.”

My mom used to tell this story of my first day of kindergarten, how I came home so dead tired I punched her. I remembered that, hitting my mom, as surprised as she was. I still couldn’t’ve told you why I’d done it.

I was thinking of that and of the mothers who drowned themselves along with their own children on account of the world was too fucking shitty to live in when I poured the mineral spirits into Sophia’s gnashing mouth.

Sophia gagged.

“What the hell are you doing?” Dorothy demanded.

I threw the lit cigarette down, down.

A still moment. Sophia’s jaws slowed.

Flames. Black smoke billowing up inside her.

I remembered the glassy look of my father’s eyes as he stared up at me for the last time. His eye was a seed. I watched as the seed became a sprout, a flower. Then the PBR came out like a violent reprimand, dropping my body against the cold metal rails with the same determined impassivity of Dad’s belt.

Shh, Mama whispered in my ear.

If I’d laid my head down, closed my eyes, then I would’ve heard their voices: Rose, Blanche, and Dorothy telling me to get the hell out. I would’ve felt their arms surrounding me. Cold, metallic, hard, and strong, lifting me up and out.

But knowing me, I wouldn’t’ve given in, see? Not with the smell of oil everywhere, smoke like marching orders, and that reminder in my father’s dead eye: sometimes, you gotta raze it all so them wildflowers and life can come back and build a home.

 “It’ll be better,” I’d tell my girls as I left them. “Everything will be better in the morning.”

---

Bethany Tap’s work has recently been published or is forthcoming in Flash Fiction Magazine, The MacGuffin, Emerge Literary Journal, and Fahmidan Journal, among others. Her novel, Upon the Burning, is forthcoming in 2025 with Midnight Meadow Publishing. More of her work can be found at bethanytap.com. She lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan with her wife and four kids and works for a cold forging manufacturer.