slow burn by Amber V. '24

idk man it was a strange day. haven’t written horror in a sec. also cw: gore ? 

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The void is calling to you. You speak to the machines.

You rose closer with the sun today, shivered on the way to lab, the morning pale and grey. There are jobs that need doing in the basement by the street, where a massive CNC machine chatters and hums. You’re breathing foul chemicals you do not know the name of. They make the metal that you cut look clean. 

One piece you cut is fine and smooth, but the next has flaws in the designs. Someone else, perhaps as sleepless as yourself, forgot half the holes and channels. You set to fixing it, blinking through a tired haze. Your hands tremble with caffeine, this old well-trodden routine. This time you know the remedies: you trace the cuts, the way the machine will go.

You set a probe in the machine, a thin stick with a delicate and costly red glass ball at the end, and send it slowly shooting down. The void then does not call, it screams: smash it. Just to see the ball shatter. To remove the fear of messing up. You could crush that scarlet globe and the world would not crack. The shopmasters would not even be angry, just annoyed, and you’d have to spend time inserting a new probe.

You stop the probe one inch above your stock piece, tell the machine to measure the distance between the two. The void reduces to a whisper.

Nothing breaks, and the work progresses but isn’t finished entirely. You will be back again tomorrow.

Next you rush down the halls, crowded now with people. You find a different basement lab — the forge — which is usually sweltering but right now is simply warm. The taciturn forgemaster with the tattoo sleeve, whose name your little sister said came out of the fantasy novels you both used to read, is showing a student blocks of plaster with cast bronze medallions inside. The forgemaster lifts one block high and lets it smash to the ground. Plaster explodes to all sides. The three of you spend the next half hour chipping at the parts of plaster that didn’t break, freeing the bronze medallions.

The student asks for gloves, but you’ve had worse chemicals beneath your skin. You chip away the plaster as it dries your hands, makes your forearms itch.

Then there is class you’re only somewhat late for, where you are spoon-fed MatLab line by line. 

Next you are at your UROP lab, above ground but with no windows, pulling on a man’s green smock and floppy leather gloves. You’re welding a fuel tank. You put on crashing metal music, but the air filtration system drowns out all other sound.

You turn on the welder — it’s a TIG welder which is akin to a massive, bright solder. Your hands and arms are covered so the brightness doesn’t sear your skin, but you are wearing ripped jeans. If you do it right, nothing will spark, no molten metal will fly onto your skin. 

The electric circuit of the welder is operated with a foot pedal. Press down and electricity will flow. When you turn on the machine and grip the welding tip in hand, mask up, eyes exposed, the void rushes up through you. You could hit the pedal, shoot electricity into the air; you are at least 90% sure that nothing would happen. A google search tells you 100%. Even so. You imagine a shock passing through you, enough energy to melt metal shooting through you to the floor.

Your foot is itching over the pedal the way it never does over the gas, in a car, when the results are much more dire. But you don’t dare. Instead you tip the mask down, set the weld tip to the metal, start a spark and a circuit between the two.

The void falls away but as you fall into the work it keeps returning. When soldering, nothing will burn unless it’s within a centimeter of the solder gun; it’s easy to hold the solder wire from a proper distance. With welding, your gloves begin to heat up four inches away. You’ve seen two-inch-long wire bits, proof a more experienced welder could bring the wire closer and closer. Or perhaps a welder with heftier gloves. Even so, every time you get near the end, your fingers edge closer and closer, feeling a heat soak into the leather. Sometimes it burns, and you whip off the glove, press your fingers to your lips. 

You don’t finish the project but you’re nearly there, and no disaster happened, no burn marks on the gloves or your skin.

Finally it’s forging time. You stretch and wander down the outfinite, where the evening light is grey. You’ve been with the machines all day.

In the forge you’re crafting a dragon, which means holding chisels and various hand tools close to hot metal, hammering them at awkward angles. The chisels drink the heat from the workpiece, until they too are searing hot, so you wear gloves. The gloves heat up; when you return the piece to the fire, you take them off, feel the warm palms.

You lean over the dragon, checking on the growth of his teeth or his horns. He’s not red anymore but that is the most dangerous, when the metal is grey but just barely. Your brain doesn’t register the heat this way. The void whispers to grab the thing in your bare hands. At one point you smell burning hair, a stray strand that touched the dragon. 

When the dragon is red-hot the void rises again, conjures the burn and bubble of skin if you wrapped your whole hand around its head. You keep hammering. The dragon’s nose and eyes emerge, his angry eyebrows, the curl of his lower horns. 

You’ve burned yourself a couple times in here, but always through carelessness or a bad stroke of luck. This time you are careful, wary of your tiredness, how easy a mistake would be. You think of the work you choose, where mistakes are dangerous. Your deepest scar is from this year. How many craftsmen are missing chunks of their fingers. 

On bad nights, when you were young, you dreamt of crashing cars: careening down the street however much you slammed the brake, deadly straight for all that you yanked the steering wheel.  

Now you dream of the machines. When the alarm rips you from sleep it’s pulling you from sharp spinning blades eating your hair, rapidly drawing your head to the blade. Spinning wire brushes wipe the skin from your fingers. Pounding hammers smash through bones—

But that isn’t common. At least not for you to remember you wake; these dreams are buried in your REM cycles, the few that you can scrape. They are a wariness, a warning.

The void is not usually so strong. Maybe it’s the caffeine. Maybe tomorrow you’ll get more sleep before you speak to the machines.