The Tool Factory

The factory workers thread parts together to make multi-knives, electric screwdrivers, soldering irons, every tool they could have imagined. They knead their hands open from fists, after hours at the big machines. These women crowd around the manager’s desk at lunch time: the youngest ones who’ve been here barely a year radiating health, fingers deft and light; younger ones with cupped hands like supplicants holding bowls for change; old-timers with hands clenched and curled.

The manager is never the same each time they look at her. Sometimes she is a white parrot, sometimes she is a little girl that needs the workers to hold her hand she is so afraid of the din of the machines, sometimes she is a pack of wolves. They tell the manager what they know; Aluminum can withstand loads of more than 90,000 pounds per square inch. It is estimated that plastic can resist decomposition for as long as 50,000 years. Girls, the manager’s secretary says, give her room, and they flutter back to their stations.

The manager stumbles over a girl on hand and knees on the assembly floor. That time, the manager snails around the factory, her shell an enormous stack of paperwork that goes flying when she trips on the girl. Emergency buzzers ring, red lights pulsing. The belt slams to a halt. The girl’s an old-timer, her hands cupped like beggars’, but she’s lost her touch. She keeps dropping little cogs off the conveyor belt, her mounds of hands like paws as she crawls under her station to look for the missing part.

The secretary says, Did you know that aluminum can be spun into a filament so fine that only one and a half pounds of it could encircle the earth, hug the earth, choke the world?

I did not, the manager says. Then she fires the girl.

The fired girl holds her hands out in front of her, palms upward, like she carries the weight of the air, an invisible burden. She whispers, But what else am I capable of?

Please, the manager says, you must look at this as an opportunity. It’s not about you. Surely you’re more than this.

The fired girl says, I can see the whole machine, and who wields me at what time. But I am a cog in the machine, and my eyes are forced outward, and I cannot see my own shape.

Now the manager is an engine from a Ford Model-T. She hums. We are all engines, she tells the fired girl. Listen.

The manager, the secretary, and the girl all close their eyes. Hand tools are limited by the strength of the person who uses them. Power tools are equipped with motors or engines that substitute for human strength and usually exceed it. The sweat in the air smells of the acrid copper and iron of the factory.

Suddenly the girl’s hands are on the manager’s face, padding her in slaps that feel like lashes from a whip. This is your shape, this is your shape, the girl says, but nowhere do her hands cup perfectly. Finally, the secretary pins her to the manager’s desk. The manager becomes a little girl who trembles in her school uniform.

Are you more than this? the fired girl asks, out of breath, holding an engine cog she’s pulled out of the manager’s hair. The manager takes back the cog.

Back on the factory floor, the fired girl stares at the conveyer belt running past like a river. She climbs onto the rubber platform. She spreads her arms on the belt, her cupped hands above her head. Her hair flays out in shiny strands of gold around her head and sinks into the rubber tread. The belt delivers her headfirst toward the metal stamper, which soon will piece her into the shapes of tools: a bottle opener, a fish scaler, a hundred serrated blades.

The foremen in the factory run alongside her and scoop her off the belt with cupped hands. They carry her with fists underneath...