In ‘Factory’, a young girl, somewhere in landlocked North America, accompanies her father on his night-shifts as a factory cleaner – a job he performs once all the machines are turned off and the buildings are emptied of workers.
At eleven, the girl is on the threshold of learning what it means to be an adult, and, specifically, what it means to be a woman. The deserted factories provide a perfect metaphor for the unknowable expanse of the adult world, as does the girl’s fascination with the sea (which she has never visited). She dreams particularly of what it might be like to visit the ocean at night, “because that is when an ocean can be itself”, and because the ocean at night “is peculiar and it is dangerous”.
So many things are left unsaid (by the author and by the characters themselves), and the whole story rings with vastness and emptiness. The images and the meaning meld seamlessly, and it becomes much more than the sum of its parts.
First published in Forge, 2021, and available to read online here
A Personal Anthology 