cowt 11 sett 6 M3: jenny (original, r, suicide cw)

[janie_tangerine]

for M3, team Calico, prompt 10: You’ll be back, soon you’ll see, you’ll remember you belong to me.

 

 



My wife always used to say, oh, you think I’m the love of his life? That’s not me. It always was Jenny.

 

She’d laugh when she said that. Most people in our circle knew that Jenny wasn’t a woman, at the end of it. The few who didn’t know were immediately let in on the joke, and then they’d laugh and ask who in their right mind would call Jenny a steel furnace.

 

Those few weren’t from around here.

 

Those few really had no idea what they were talking about.

 

My wife was right. I did love her, I did, I married her just out of high school and I paid for the wedding with my first five steel mill paychecks.

 

But she wasn’t Jenny.

 

She never burned me the way Jenny did. She never left my hands covered in blisters after each long shift. She didn’t fill my eyes with blinding white-hot light as I worked. She didn’t leave my skin inflamed at the end of every working day. She didn’t call to me like a siren with the sound of all that steel clanking as I brought it into existence.

 

I was almost sad, when I left her every day at the end of my shift.

 

I had loved Jenny since my eyes landed on her as a child, maybe she was even my first memory, as my father explained me what she meant to our town.

 

I thought I would never retire and I would die with her.

 

Except that they’re retiring her tomorrow, long before my own time.

 

That’s not me. It was always Jenny.

 

She wasn’t wrong, as much as she was halfway maybe joking.

 

Oh, she was not.

 

Not at all.

 

I woke up in the morning thinking, I have to get to work. I was sorry to leave in the evening. Things were good there. I had friends, we all knew we would have ended up working there same as our fathers did but you see, we didn’t see it as a lost fight, doing the job your father used to have. If they worked in the mills then it was just natural that you might, too, and I had loved Jenny since I saw her and I had done everything I could to work there, in that one steel mill, not in any of the others, and they took me just out of high school – I didn’t graduate with honors or anything, but what did I care?

I wanted Jenny, not a six-figure salary at some fancy company. Jenny gave me enough of a salary to have a nice house and support my wife and our son and our daughter, and you bet I brought him to the mill, too, like my father did before me, showed him Jenny, told him that’s where I work, that’s where we almost all do, and she was burning then, blowing all that dark smoke into the clouds, it was my off day and I almost was sad, that was why I did overtime, a lot of overtime, and I always brought home a nice chunk of extra money for that, but –

 

I’m sorry, I’m digressing. We were saying – oh, Jenny.

 

Do you know you could see her for miles, all along the river? She was so tall, so large, so imposing, no other furnace was like Jenny, no other factory had one like her, and do you know how many tons of steel she produced?

 

I don’t know either.

 

I lost count.

 

But it was a lot of ‘em.

 

We’d push them into shape and ship them out and look at the dark soot under our nails that never washed away, it had been there since the day we all walked into the factory and soap never did anything for that. My wife adjusted to it. It was the price for putting foot on the table. But good fucking God, I loved it. I didn’t understand how clerks and other men could have soft hands with white fingers and no callouses anywhere. What was the satisfaction in that? What job could you do with soft pale hands that never got stained once?

 

She’s a secretary. Her hands only ever got dirty with ink. She could wash it away without a problem, she could. I couldn’t wash away my soot, but that was all right – I liked seeing it there anyway. I liked seeing my hands stained in black even when they were clean. It was proof I did my job well. The fire in that furnace burned behind my eyelids and I dreamed of it at night, and it was a pleasurable sight. In my dreams, I could stare at the furnace for hours without having to tear my eyes away. They never got tired or teared up. They just… filled up with fire, with heat, with Jenny.

 

When I woke up, I always was sad.

 

I wished that I could look at that furnace like that in real life, but alas. That was not meant to be, I knew, and still.

 

And still, I wouldn’t have wanted to work anywhere else. I also was sure that my son would work with me, too, at some point; she was so imposing, business always had been going so well, she’d be there for him the way she had been there for me, Jenny with her scorching heat and the sound of steel clanking and frizzling while we whipped it into shape. We knew where that steel went. That steel went everywhere. Can you imagine living in a relatively small town in Ohio and producing most of the steel being sold in the whole country? All fifty states, all getting what came out of our furnaces; me and my friends, we always would joke about those prissy hippies in California who most likely thought of us as backwards almost mountain men needing our work without even realizing it.

 

Ah, the guys at the mill.

 

They got it.

 

Their hands were like mine, the soot was forever etched under their fingernails same as me, they all had their skin covered in blisters at some point, and none of us ever complained about it nor ever was really hurt seriously for that. We knew it was a risky job, but we were good at it for one reason, weren’t we?

 

Oh, you’re asking yourself why I’m saying, we were?

 

I’ll get there soon, don’t you worry.

 

I wish it didn’t have to be the case. I wish I could have stayed there, I wish we could have all stayed there, working in that mill, getting a beer after work in some bar from which you could see Jenny’s shape stark against the setting sun, the black hulk blacklighting against the peach and pink sky brightened by the smoke still leaving the chimneys, making it stand even more starkly, knowing the furnace was still burning and burning and burning.

 

It didn’t.

 

You’ll say, all good things come to an end and so on, but you’d really be missing the point. That wasn’t just a good thing, it was our job, and it went away just like that. ‘Course, no one had suspected it. Okay, there were rumors going around, that the steel was selling less and so on, but none of ‘em said we were going to close.

 

And yet we did. They shut everything down, fired us from one day to the other, never giving us a way out, and knowing that we couldn’t find another job, and you’d think that’s why I was angrier, you’d think that was what was gutting me, you’d think it was what was turning my stomach inside out, and yet.

 

Yet what was the worst was that they killed Jenny, too.

 

Do you know that once you turn off a furnace you can’t light it up anymore? It has to always burn, all the time; if you shut it, then the entire place isn’t going to come back to life anymore.

 

And they killed her.

 

They shut the furnace down for good, and at that point there was no smoke decorating the sunset sky anymore, and there were gone my hopes of seeing my son walk in there the same way I did, and there was no severance or anything.

 

And Jenny was dead.

 

I walked in front of her every day, trying to find a new job, for what it was worth, even if nothing would have been like my old one, the only one I ever knew, the only one I ever wanted.

 

She was cold, black, dead.

 

There was no pulsing core in her anymore. She was there surrounded by snow and with a barely locked entrance door, and she was gone.

 

She stood there like some kind of cruel joke, reminding me of everything she had been, of everything we had accomplished in there, of how much she scalded my hands, of how much steel I had beaten into shape, of how much her flames marked my eyes to the point where not seeing them daily felt wrong.

 

My wife said I’d find something else. There were jobs all over town for people who had graduated high school but barely, she said she did saw advertising for bartenders and such on her way to work, and I swear, I did apply. I applied, and yet.

 

And yet they didn’t want me.

 

My hands were too dirty for any other job that wasn’t beating steel up into shape.

 

My skin was too blistered and too rough.

 

I didn’t understand computers and all that shit, and certainly I couldn’t teach anything. I could only teach people how to be a steel worker, and none of the other few opened mills searched for new workers, of course they didn’t, they were already staffed full and the other workers were scared sick they’d lose their jobs, too. Which was why we started looking at each other wrong – we hated them for still having a job, they were afraid to become like us.

 

At the end, I got a gig as a security guard part time, with the night shift. It wasn’t well-paid and it meant I didn’t see my wife and kids if not at dinner, but one secretary paycheck wasn’t going to support four people and whatever I made there was better than nothing.

 

The club I worked for was within sight of Jenny.

 

I think that was where I started hearing her.

 

It was a woman’s voice. It was like none I ever heard before.

 

You’ll be back, she said. She whispered it at first, and then louder. You’ll be back, you’ll be back, you’ll be back. That was for the first couple of days.

 

Then it was more. Soon you’ll see, she said. Soon, you’ll see, you’ll remember you belong to me.

 

That was when I knew it was Jenny. A week after I started, she said that, and I wanted to laugh, because Jenny, my Jenny, had been wrong for the first time in my life.

 

I never forgot that I belonged to her. I never forgot it even for one moment. I belonged into her heart, I belonged into her furnace, I wasn’t meant to work anywhere else, and if Jenny was dead, what right did I have to live?

 

What right did I have?

 

“You look tired,” my wife always asked. “Do you sleep, when you come back from work?”

 

“Sure,” I said, and I wasn’t lying. I did sleep, when I came back from work. I just only dreamt about Jenny and going back to work and whipping steel into shape over and over and over again, and then I would wake up with tears in my eyes and missing the smell of fire and soot, and of course I was tired.

 

Because what I was doing was not work. Because what I was doing was wrong. I wasn’t meant to drag drunk assholes out of that bar. I was meant to do something more, I was meant to burn and burn and burn along with her, and –

 

And Jenny didn’t burn anymore.

 

Jenny was a ghost now, a ghost who kept on whispering those words in my hear, you’ll remember you belong to me.

 

As if I needed to remember it.

 

As if I had to.

 

I always belonged to her, from the moment my lungs breathed the soot in this city’s air when I was a baby, same as my son, who doesn’t know, will never know.

 

It’s been three months.

 

I hate that job.

 

I still hear Jenny all the time.

 

And honestly, this is not where I want to be. My bed is cold, my wife only worries about me, my kids also seem to only do that, and I’m tired.

 

My friends are all like me, if not unemployed. I see them getting drunker and drunker and more wasted every day they don’t find a job.

 

And I can’t help them. I can’t help anyone.

 

And I only ever think about Jenny.

 

I think about Jenny and her smoldering heat, and I think, this is not how I want to live, which is why I’m leaving this written for whichever journalist will give a damn for publishing it.

 

No one knows what I will do after my shift is over, tonight.

 

I made sure no one even suspected.

 

I finish working at five thirty in the morning. The sun usually rises half an hour from then, these days.

 

I’m going to buy a tank of gasoline at the nearest pit stop, then I’m going to buy a lighter, too.

Then I’ll walk into the factory – really, breaking that lock should be easy, and if not, I can find a back door.

 

Then I’ll go inside, reaching the furnace, and there –

 

Well.

 

I’ll bathe in that gasoline and set it on fire, and then I’ll finally belong to Jenny fully, and I’ll light it up again and she’ll be alive with me even for just a moment, and that will be enough. She’s right. I belong to her and only her, and if they hadn’t torn us apart I wouldn’t have needed to do this, but I do.

 

And I’ll do that as the sun rises and the sky is pink and orange again, and maybe smoke won’t come out of the chimneys but I’ll pretend my ashes will float into the sky like all that soot, and I’ll be where I belong, someplace I should have never left, and I won’t have to live through all of this fucking grueling steady stream of humiliation and wrongness.

 

Someone will find my letter, and they’ll say I was crazy, and I know they will. No one will publish it. Only my family will cry for me, if they still have it in them too, because they seem to think I’m going slowly mad, too.

 

But I won’t care.

 

I won’t care at all.

 

Because… Jenny, my Jenny, I do belong to you.

 

I remember that very, very well.

 

I’ll die with you as I should have had from the get-go.

 

And nothing will ever tear us apart again.

 

And I’ll burn within you, and everything will finally be all right.

 

Wait for me, my darling.

 

I’m coming home.

 

 

 

End.