The Disassembling
Think about the word. Adjunct.
The word sounds like a broken thing, or a breaking, the sound a tired machine makes as it shudders into obsolescence in an old factory somewhere on the east side of town, across the tracks, where only two or maybe three people are still employed to even hear such a sound, working late at night under the steady whine of fluorescent lights and already glancing at the white clock on the wall, with its steady black hands and bold black numbers, cursing themselves for glancing at the clock because that summons the wraiths that haunt the space between the chronological passage of time, tick, tick, tick, and their own subjective experience of time. These wraiths come out at some point every night, and once they’re out, they get in the joints of these two or maybe three people, in their ears, behind their eyes, clouding their minds, slowing everything down.
Adjunct. There it is. The breaking. The coming undone. Something has fallen off the machine and then it is very quiet in that old factory. The two or maybe three people move forward, tentatively, first tapping at the edges of the machine, then running their hands along its sides as if it has a heart that they can locate, but of course it doesn’t have a heart, it’s a machine, and so they start unbuckling, unscrewing, uncapping, uncoupling, unplugging. The temporal wraiths scream, silently, as they metastasize in the workers’ joints and curdle in their skulls.
Junk. It’s embedded in his title. Encoded. So is junked. How has he never noticed this before?
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