Full Frontal Fiction Read Online Free PDF

hands.
    He waited a beat or two too long before he answered her. I love you, he said then, but it was wooden, the way he said it. She changed the subject, asked him if he was afraid someone he knew might see them. He told her the mill was, like every place, so automated it was almost empty. Just a man or woman here or there to tend to emergencies and start up the machines. You could go in the largest mill or power plant, he said, and see room after room of abandoned desks. And anyway, though they knew him here, it was a different life. It couldn’t touch his present one.
    Completely self-contained, she said, and she tried to laugh.
    There was motion everywhere she looked, but he was right, no human beings. There were buckets that rose up and down on belts, and man-lifts only one foot wide. You could jump on one, he said, and rise up ten floors like you’d ingested yeast. She tried to put her arm around his waist but felt him move away. When the lift went by from the bottom floor, he stepped onto a step about a foot wide, and he rose into the air. Now she’d done it. She would never again as long as she knew him mention the word
love.
He rose clear to the top of the building. She could see the bottom of his heels six floors above her.
    He was nothing more to the person who made that lift than one of the buckets of grain, a container of pulsing blood. Why should he be any more than that to her. She could turn and leave this building but instead she called to him. Don’t leave me here, she said. Please please come back down to me. She waited for him to return, like the receipt in a pneumatic tube.
    When he came back down, she tried to laugh again, and still it didn’t work. She was feverish, she was dizzy, not the least bit well. You scared the hell out of me, she said to him. No matter what you say, you know you’re such a goddamn boy.
    There were beams in the floor of the mill like a log cabin, bags of barley flour everywhere, soot on the wall from a fire, ink stains on the floor. She followed him then past metal pipes, past giant bags of flour, past boxes marked SWINE STARTER and NIACIN, past gray flour dust and a curving wall that echoed the curve of the railroad track outside of it.
    Once he’d brought her silver metal balls you were supposed to roll around the palm of your hand. He’d put them deep inside of her, there were bells inside those balls, and he’d taken his hand and made her come and listened to the muffled sound of the bells. She remembered it now because every inch of the floor was covered with grain that rolled like ball bearings underneath her feet.
    She slid several times on the grain and dodged pipes and the lifts that continued circling up and down on thick strong belts.
    Finally they walked into a large, window-lined room. The room was filled with enormous golden oak boxes, like armoires, arranged in two straight lines and suspended from the ceiling and up from the floor on black rubber stems.
    Look, he said, and she did.
    She thought something was wrong with her eyes because every one of those wardrobes was shimmying, twisting around on the rubber stems with a motion like belly dancers. These are the sifters, he said, they separate the wheat and chaff. They shook and shook and a part of the concrete block wall and all the paned windows shook.
    Inside the wardrobes the grain fell through metal nets with a thread count as dense and fine as percale sheets. The bran swirled like sparks when he opened the machine and pointed a penlight.
    The dark shaking windows, the whole room vibrating. She could feel the power in the engines all the way through her body.
    No one else was in there with them. He put his hand on a wooden sifter and held out his other hand to her, and she took it. Why couldn’t she stay mad at him? Jesus, she said, oh dear Jesus God, please talk to me. She could already feel the vibrations in the soles of her feet, the shaking windows, through his hand,