Screaming Sound of Machines
From Ollywiki
The Screaming sound of machines:
No characters appear and the sound throughout the piece is the screaming sound of machines. (In reference to Yuichi Yokoyama’s ‘New Engineering.’)
INTO THE GREY SUN Anthology of West Coast Speculative Fiction.
A 1988 Ford Trauma.
The headache floats onto my skull like a sheet of yellow gauze embroidered with a myriad metallic crosses that spin on their axes and bore into the sweet red jelly of my mind.
A man pounding a sac of kittens with a hammer. A man with a hand tooled belt limping. His pants are hiked up beyond where his navel should be. Objects remembering objects. Insert your imaginary fingers here. A white cabbage butterfly snagged on a thorn. A man on his way down to a bar when he doesn’t know it is closed. A satellite dish choked in ivy. The incessant wind. viscosity.
Late summer:
Like winged pens the whirring hearted swallows transcribe the lives of the mayflies, old after just a few hours, their legs falling off in the viscous air.
It was strange the way it all got started. It was a Sunday, in the seething viridian of summer. The Donofrios had been away for the last week or so, up at their cottage in the Muskokas. They were having an addition built onto their tidy, red brick, neo colonial and wanted to get away from the noise and dust of the renovations for a while. The contractors had the day off of course and the wooden rafters and stud walls glowed in the morning sun like yellow bones. I had just got up and was poking around my front garden, admiring the mock oranges and nursing my celadon mug of tea. The air had the usual cossetted, weekend ambience about it - the hiss of sprinklers, the chuck-chuck-chucking of robins, the rumble of a distant jet. A sudden pop reverberated through the humid air and I looked up to see a thin plume of white smoke rising from the construction site. That’s when things started going a little nuts. The McFadden boys, Debbie Willis and a whole bunch of other kids I didn’t really know came swarming out of the building carrying arm loads of bricks. They immediately started hurling them at the picture windows all up and down Ludbrook Court. The sound of smashing glass and the outraged yelps of the homeowners soon filled the street. The kids had set up a kind of supply line back to the Donofrios to keep the bricks coming. When old Mr. Simms tried to wrestle a brick from Steven Higgenbottom’s hands, they swarmed him, tearing at his clothes and kicking at his legs until he was down on the sidewalk, where a few of the younger ones smashed at his head with bricks until he was dead. I can still hear old Simms’ death moans. They saw me watching and a couple of the Zaborski kids started chasing me, brandishing bricks with which to crack my skull. But I ran for it. They gave up after about a kilometre or so, distracted by an old lady who came screaming out of her house at them in her bathrobe. I think she died fairly quickly.
