Wire

No more. No more damp waits on muddy banks.

It lay there, bent into its extruded state. It stayed there. It was difficult to imagine how something so thin and so pliable could be so rigid. Although its initial appearance was a dulled-over silver, closer inspection revealed that dirt-streaks of red and blue were swathed across the surface.

It had been manufactured from pure pain. Pure pain was regularly distilled from the tissues of the temporary residents and spun across the entire length of the manufacturing room that lay next to the morgue itself until the appropriate thickness, or rather thinness, was obtained.

Next, other parts of itself were snapped off and wrapped around itself. They were spiked to an end that reduced the thickness to nothing yet did not diminish the strength, in fact intensified it with the bullying power of the barb.

Hair, eyelashes, the follicles shaved from limbs, were all utilised to the cause. It was as if the people were smiling through the pain. It was as if the body of the wire were pain and the wrapped-around points were distillations of laughter. A perfect, evenly spaced embodiment of twisted and stretched and sharpened laughing pain.

Nothing was mixed; everything was matched exactly.

This donor-victim had been a fisherman. He was used to the barbs of the hook and the gaff. His patient nature had imbued his pain with a quality that was slightly dried-out but nevertheless still flexible and it was this malleability that made it ideal for the manufacture of the pain-wire.

He had no more pain. Women in white coats in the next room had finished distorting his pain into rope-twists above the sterile floors of their job-space prior to the final extrusion. His pain was humming across the space and was being ordered – neatly – into place.

Once pulled out and bent over itself at regular intervals, it was ready to be rolled in over itself and stored, ready to be used (and reused) in an outside world.

He was left in the next room, no longer a fisherman, no longer possessed of his pain, slowly losing, one by one, the attributes he had previously possessed, oblivious to each successive depredation.

The wire itself, cleaned and dirtied, no longer hummed with menace: silence was its role now. But a faint glow, not static, but rather rolling over itself with flecks of mist escaping, gave memory of what had produced it.

It was the correct order of things. An individual day of judgement had arrived. It was time to pass on everything that had been accreted. Too late to share anything now. Pain had been individual. The pain would now be spread.

The women in white coats rolled up their gloves and left the room, their quota satisfied: one personful was enough pain for one day. Male attendants in brown coats in the morgue made haste to remove the earthly remains.

The technicians rolled up the wire, and secured it for its transport: rolled-up pain, ready to be redelivered to the world.