the year the factory stopped
(2022)
An ordinary morning, an interview to prepare for,a man stepping out of his front doorinto a swarm of wasps, as if the old storieshad sent their smallest soldiers first.Then the fall, the head against the driveway,and the sun standing directly overheadwhen I returned to myself,a Texas heatwave pressing down like a hand,and a fire in my blood reading one hundred and five. They say death arrives on footsteps.Mine came with wings. Kaitlyn. Andrew.Friends who came runningbefore the asking had finished leaving my mouth.Some of us are alive todaybecause somebody answered a text. Then the hospital, and the needles,and here the story turns strange.One draw. A second. A third,the nurse's face working hard at blanknessand failing, failing.Then the doctor himself, fourth needle in hand,speaking the sentence that divides a lifeinto before and after.Either our machines are wrong,or you have hours. The factory in my bones had gone silent.Red cells, white cells, platelets,all of them gone the way harmattan strips a tree,leaf by leaf, until the branches stand bareand no one can say which wind took the first one.No reason, they said, that I should be speaking. And yet I was speaking. (Why are you alive, the readings asked.Why are you alive, the doctors asked.I did not know yetthat a question can be a door.) They wheeled me toward the room of gas and sleep,and terror sat on my chest like a stone,and I, a man who had wandered farfrom his father's house,whose prayers had gone quiet in his mouththrough all the busy years,ran home the only way left to run.Father, it is me. I am sorry I turned away.Save me, and I am yours.Heal me, and I am your instrument.My story has only begun. My work is not finished.I vow it. I vow it. Then the night of blood.Four bags of a stranger's mercyhanging above me like dark fruit,and my mother beside me through all of it,torn between her God and her son,refusing to release my hand.What she prayed that night is written wholein her own praise-song, where it belongs,and I will not spend it twice. (Somewhere tonight a stranger's bloodis still walking around inside me.I never learned their name.I have become their thank you letter.) And days later the factory started again.Nobody threw a switch. Nobody gave the order.The lines simply began to movethe way a mill wakes in a townwhere every worker has gone home,and the doctors stood in the doorway of itwith their clipboards and their reasonsand had none.No diagnosis. No mechanism. No answer.They closed a file on a question that cannot close. They never found what tried to kill me.I never found the edge of what saved me. So I live now as the answerto a question no one can properly ask.Alive on purpose. Alive like a vowwalking around in shoes. Some seasons I believe I am keeping it.Some seasons I am certain I have fallen behind.There is no scale in this housethat weighs a promise made under anesthesia,and enough is not a numberanyone has ever shown me. So I have taken the stranger's method.Give what is in the hand. Do not sign it.Four bags came to me once from a personwho never learned my nameand never returned to be thanked.That is the whole instruction.I am still learning to follow it. And when the work grows heavyand the race feels long,I go back to the man on the gurneystill bargaining with heaven for one more chapter,and I sit with him a while.I do not tell him whether it was enough.Neither of us will know thatuntil the day the work is taken from our hands. — tachi
next in the long tellings Ogun, if it was you 