Whir, Click!

The heavy brass manacle on his wrist had a flip clock, and the clock dictated his every moment. The split-face cards whirred and clicked, and the numbers gave their command. When he awoke on his cold hard, bamboo sleeping mat. When he ate his cold gruel. When he took a cold shower. When he was sent to work outside in the blazing desert. When he could take a sip of hot, tinny water from  his canteen. When he could suffer. When he could despair.

The memory of warmth brought him comfort when he was freezing. The memory of shivering through the cold nights cooled him when the relentless sun baked his skin. The memory of home kept him moving forward, even though he didn't know where he was going.

Whir, click! 

He dug his pick into the rock, questing out the metals.

Whir, click!

He loaded the ore into the heavy cart.

Whir, click! 

He strained against the cart and pushed it laboriously to the blast furnace.

Other prisoners, each with their own brass manacle, fed the coke, ore, and flux into the top of the furnace, while other prisoners pumped the bellows. Rows and rows of crucibles the size of wine barrels stood ready to pour their molten contents into depressions of wet, unbaked sand manacle-shaped molds. Yet another prisoner would fill his empty cart with the castoff slag and he would push it back down the long, winding ramp of the open-pit mine and begin again.

He did this for years. He didn't know how many, not exactly. The manacle clocks did not tell the date, only the time. There were seasons, of a sort. There was no vegetation to bloom and denote the coming of spring, no trees with leaves to change color and drop away. The days got shorter, the days got longer. There were bad days, and there were less-bad days.

His life was ebbing way, rolling down an ever-growing pit, in slow, concentric circles. 

Whir, click!

One morning, the other prisoners awoke to find him gone. Inside the blast furnace, they discovered his manacle clock. It lay in a warped, twisted lump on the ground. Fused within it, now a part of it, was a brass fist, clenched in pain and defiance; a lost-wax casting of a human hand.

THE END

Author's Note: Has it been a month yet? I think it has. Yet here we are. Also, I'm pretty sure lost-wax casting doesn't really work that way BUT let's try not to take things too literally today. Thank you. This is another blank-page story, which means I sat down to write something, was scrolling through my dozens of drafts (not real drafts, germs of ideas mostly) couldn't decide on one, and then this came out. 

You can't see it, because that's not how reading works, but there is a literal hour between the last whir-click and the last paragraph. That whir-click was the original ending. I hated it. I didn't want it. I sat and stared at it, loathing, seething, foaming at the mouth a little. And I hit my head against it until it became something different. Now to sleep, perchance to dream, oh and I think there's some leftover Halloween candy in the fridge. Aw, but I already brushed my teeth. Goodnight!