The factory

 I did not mean to walk into the building.

I don’t even know if it was a building, not in the way we think of buildings. No doorframe. No threshold. Just a slit in rusted metal where warm air breathed out like the exhaust of a sleeping creature.

I looked up and the building seemed to rise endlessly, and it stretched out all around me im every direction.

Inside it smelled like saltwater and hot iron, mixed with sweat and blood. 

There were voices—low, buzzing, not words but… the suggestion of words. Machinery echoing in human shapes.

Screams, horrific and guttural mixed with loud crashes of metal slamming metal and drills grinding. 

The floor was wet with a vicious fluid and pipes clattered and thunked over head. 

I wanted to leave this place, but the slit I’d entered through was gone. 

Steam and coal driven conveyors moved parts and pieces all around and molten metal,poured into clock work molds.

People ran all around, wearing goggles and black jumps suits, under white aprons stained with red and smudged with black where Hans hand been wiped clean. 

They brandished butches cleavers, and hammers, pliers and other devices meant for torture, or industrial work, I could not tell.

Then, In a single moment, silence. 

And I began to rise off the floor into the air to behold the horror of what stumbled into.

I rose slowly—not lifted by hands or hooks, but by some silent force that felt like the air itself had changed its mind about what direction “down” was. 

Everything had stopped.

Not slowed.

Not paused.

Stopped.

A droplet of blood hung in the air beneath a butcher’s cleaver, perfectly round.

A gust of steam remained in place as a white, feathered cloud, unmoving.

A boy’s scream sat in his throat, mouth open, eyes widened, the sound frozen behind his teeth like ice.

Pistons mid-stroke.

Gears mid-turn.

Flames mid-flicker.

Even the sparks—a shower of orange from a grinder—hovered like glowing dust motes waiting for permission to fall.

I drifted higher, as if the factory wanted me to see it all.

Rows and rows of children lay locked in their agony. One girl arched off a table, tendons in her neck straining, but her chest didn’t rise and her tears didn’t move. Another boy had one arm replaced with a steel frame, surgeons mid-rotation, scalpel inches from his skin but refusing to touch it.

A man in a red-stained apron stood with his hand pressed against a boy’s chest. His fingers were sunk half an inch into the skin—as if he’d been pushing to feel bone beneath muscle—but the flesh didn’t yield or recoil.

It was all sculpture.

All display.

All horror turned into a perfect, silent fresco.

The molten metal in its trough had frozen in mid-pour—halfway between container and mold—like a stream of liquid gold turned solid in a single heartbeat.

Conveyor chains hung slack and motionless, yet I could feel them wanting to move, like horses held at the starting gate.

I floated above it all, weightless, lightheaded, untethered.

And a new sensation crawled up my spine:

I knew someone had done this for me.

Not for mercy.

Not for protection.

For revelation.

So I would see everything.

The children strapped down, eyes wide and glassy.

The technicians caught mid-gesture.

The mechanical limbs half-fused to bone.

The pain frozen into their bodies like a photograph etched into metal.

This was not a moment I stumbled into.

This was a moment presented.

Like a museum exhibit.

A lesson.

A warning.

A prophecy.

Only when I turned—slowly, helplessly—did I realize I was not alone.

Something stood at the far end of the foundry.

Not moving.

Not breathing.

But watching me.

Watching me watch them.

And just as I felt its gaze settle on the marrow of me…

Time exhaled.

The scream nearest me began again—loud, raw, terrible—like it had been held underwater and finally broke the surface.

Someone shouted for tools.

Metal crashed into metal.

The world lurched.

And I fell.

When I hit the floor, the slit I entered was there again, waiting like a mouth.

I crawled out on my hands and knees and didn’t look back.

I still don’t know what froze that world.

Or why it unfroze.

Only that for one impossible moment…

someone wanted me to see it all.