Short Story: A Day in the Life

Here we go again. It’s always so hot here. Always something needs doin’, ya know? Gotta do this, gotta flip that. Every once in a while I get to meat up with one of my buddies… but it’s always so brief, then I’m alone again… waiting for the next task, the next juicy— Anyways, I’ve been having some problems recently… nothing gooey, I’m not writing all this just to tell you about my feelings so you can get in touch with the ‘real me’. It’s just… my existence has become… thin, shall we say. You wake up, greet the day, put that big smile on your face and get at ’er. You can’t let anything stop ya, hell, very little can! That’s the way it was. Now all I can think about when I wake up is that deep dark place I go to every night. They make me go. They put me there. I can’t get out… I can’t even move…. The weird noises coming from outside the walls haunt me to the core, yet I can’t escape how familiar they are. Those noises, those horrible noises, pale in comparison to the ghastly silences that accompany the end of the shift. Ten, twelve hours of nothing. Absolutely nothing! Stop. Think about it. Try it— try nothing— just for thirty seconds, then multiply. Then add the fact that this is every day! Any man would go quite mad. I’m no mere man, though. I’m different. That’s why I’m the one who’s gotta do it. Recently they’ve been makin’ me stay there during the days, too. I don’t get to come out every day any more. Sometimes even two, three days at a time. My one solace, slowly torn from me It’s just not fair! This enforced solitude may be unbearable but for the purpose— my purpose. Without one, I… I just… The new one. They’ve gotten another like me. Another that can withstand the hellish temperatures, the constant demands, and the solitude. Younger, faster, and built a lot more solidly than I am, she’ll probably last longer than I did before her replacement. I never met my predecessor. Apparently he broke pretty fast. It was a big job and he was already being overused. Still no one really saw it coming. There he was, prying apart two frozen slabs and: pang! Done! Everyone has a threshold, ya know. He found his. The worst part of this thin existence isn’t the bends. It isn’t even the thinness itself. It’s the cycle. The thinness causes the bends and the bends make you thinner, easier for the bends to happen. Sometimes I think it would be easier to just break. Just shuffle up somewhere I’m not supposed to be, somewhere I’m not expected, somewhere dangerous, and hope that someone in the wrong place at the wrong time isn’t exactly looking where they’re going and: snap! That would be the easy way out. That’s not the road for me. I’ve still got a job to do. People count on me… not as much as they used to but, still, I am needed. It’s good to be needed. I didn’t want to do it at first. I resisted. Held fast to that hard, plastic shell. But one way or another, I was comin’ out, … they made sure of that. Their knives are sharp; there’s nothing I can do about that. Was it the night before last? Yeah, I think it was. One of the workers left me out at night. In their defense, I wasn’t goin’ anywhere. Where could I go? There’s no way out for me. At first I was ecstatic. Free of the dark, if not the solitude, for one whole night. Then I remembered: sanitization! I must go through sanitization before I rest. Without it, I… deteriorate. Everything that gets on me all day eats away at me. I need sanitization or my already thin existence becomes… thinner. I hate her smug demeanor. She’s so sure of herself. At her prime, she doesn’t know what it’s like to be replaced. One day she’ll know, and I hope the thinning takes her slow like it’s takin’ me. Then’ll she’ll know what it’s like, she’ll know what it feels like to know that you’re gonna be done soon — obsolete. I don’t hate her though. It’s not her fault that the way it is is the way it is. We’re all just players in the big game of living. She’s just doing what I would do — what I did when I was younger. She does have a certain liveliness to her despite her cool exterior. Ha! Cool exterior. Not likely in these temperatures, eh? Well, I’m startin’ to get a bit wonky. That’s the heat of the day catchin’ up to me, can’t help it. That’s the way my life is. Wake up sane, slowly go insane throughout the day, nighttime: rest and recharge. Now here they come to put me away, this has been a day in the life of this spatula. That is all.