Factory

An unlit match, some prime numbers, and a few kids crying wolf.

Wally Martin knew he was going to die before the pinewood derby ended. He could feel the glue sealing his insides together, clogging up his intestines, setting the perfect siege.

“Tell my mom I loved her,” he whispered to Jed, his best friend. The Methodist church bell chimed the half-hour. A racetrack splayed across the sanctuary, chairs shoved back in hasty orbit — tipped — reverse-saddled by boys in their older brothers’ hand-me-down Cub Scout uniforms. Parents stood scattered, all too ready to referee for their sons’ wooden cars.

“I really think you’re gonna be okay,” Jed sort of stage-whispered back, and a couple of the adults turned to shush him as the derby announcer bleated out the rules of the race. Typical fare: no adding or subtracting weight after you placed your car on the scale, no one but the competitors within five feet of the track, blather blather. One boy tipped too far forward, and the ensuing tumble — hymnal, bible, attendance cards, chair, child — elicited a disdainful pause in the Scout leader’s soliloquy.

“How would you know anything about glue?” Wally asked between panicked breaths.

“My dad works in the same factory as yours,” Jed said. He wiped his nose on his sleeve.

“Yeah, but my dad owns it,” Wally said and regretted saying. He wondered how his mouth let some things stay inside and some things fly loose. He looked over at one of the stained-glass windows. Mary clinging to her grown-up dead baby. A loincloth and a bird’s nest crown. He wondered if there were eggs inside.

“On your marks — ”

The scream and scrape of the wheels echoed to the far corners of the sanctuary. Each race couldn’t have lasted more than a few seconds, but to the watchers, they seemed eternal. Once, Wally’s mom told him there was more space between zero and one than there was money in the world. Some lesson about not losing sight of value. Nothing concrete. The inevitable crash at the bottom of the track. Not every car survived unsplintered.

“How’s that belly feel, Walmart?” One of the older boys jeered at him as they walked by. He slapped Wally’s round stomach. They’d cornered him, forced him in the old supply room to eat the car repair glue. The label with his own last name.

He and his dad had spent hours making his derby car — much more than the simple doorstoppers most boys held. A wedge wasn’t enough, his father had said. It needed style. Like their house. Like their car. It wasn’t the first time he’d been cornered. Walmart eats anything, they said. Look at the little bug-eyed shit.

He could still taste the white liquid. It looks like jizz, one of them had said, making the others howl. One boy bulged his tongue in and out of his cheek, pantomiming blowjob with his hand. Wally was just beginning to understand these things. That is, he knew the language and mechanics of sex, but he didn’t really understand the mysteries, as his mom called them. He wondered if there were really any secrets, or if it was all so simple as a little Martin’s Special dribbling down his chin.

“It’s nothing personal?” Geezle pete.”

In the sudden silence, a fly landed on Adrian Martin’s solid pine desk. He swatted at the insect, missed, hand stinging from the slap. He kept his face neutral.

“I hate this as much as you, Bill, but the numbers show you stealing product.”

“The numbers? That could have been anyone. Hell, we fuck up bottles all the time and have to chuck ‘em.”

Adrian swallowed, clenching his hands together to stop them fidgeting. He’d read once that flies defecated every time they landed. Compressed action in life so abbreviated. Bill went on.

“I’ve got a family. Shelly. Jed. Naomi. Maggie. Libby. And a bun in the oven.” In the pause after each of their names, he blew out air through his nose, stared Adrian in the eyes, feral. “You know what that’s like — I mean your Hallie is expecting.”

Adrian winced. Was expecting. What am I gonna do with that crib? I could still reuse the wood if the glue hasn’t totally set. Sand most of it off if I can pry it apart. Trick is getting a thin enough knife. Point honed down near to nothing.

“Adrian? Hello?”

“Sorry, Bill.” Adrian cleared his throat. “I do know how it is. I do. But there’s better ways to make a buck than stealing from your employer. There’s always better. I’m giving you two weeks severance. Don’t ask for more.”

“I can’t believe — ”

“There’s a video,” Adrian said. There wasn’t, but the evidence was strong enough. “Your friends huffing and puffing glue harder than the big bad wolf.”

Bill deflated. Flipped the bird and stormed out of the office. Adrian blew out all the air from his lungs, and the gust picked up the top corners of a ledger sheet stack, threatening the structure. He thought about Wally and Jed, wondered if his son would make another friend. Wally seemed so unpopular. Adrian didn’t remember having to work so hard to make friends as a kid. Maybe they should keep the crib. Another chance to make a boy. He started to let numbers come into his mind, flooding out abstract thought. Money with clean rules, easy sums. Simple. One and one makes —

His office door slammed back open. Bill, face ablaze. The secretary behind him trying to apologize. Roaring: “You’re killing my family. You’re killing my children. Why don’t you just come to my house and strangle Libby? I can’t find another job with this on my record.”

Adrian waited for him to shove the desk or throw a chair. But he turned sheepish. “I need my severance pay.”

“Oh, right. Of course,” Adrian said and shoved the check in an envelope. Its glue tasted sweet. He felt the paper try to cut his tongue.

Bill snatched the money from his hand, fuming. He stood for a moment, unsure. The secretary mumbled an offer to call security, but Adrian waved him off, meeting Bill’s eyes. Neither man was one to look away.

“You ever meet a repo man?” Bill said.

“No,” Adrian said, picturing only the baby’s room at home, paint still drying on the walls. “I don’t believe I have.”

“You’d remember.”

Bill pushed past the secretary, his hand leaving a grease stain on the man’s clean-pressed shirt. He stopped short. “Sorry, man. Call me and I’ll help you wash that out. My wife’s got a trick.”

Hallie Martin couldn’t find any matches. Every time she stood, her stomach heaved, and she felt like she needed to throw up, except she hadn’t eaten all day. Dr. Garth slapped her on bed rest after the miscarriage, but she hadn’t accepted much he’d said as truth.

Miscarriage. What a clean word. Horse and carriage, a day in the countryside; carriage houses, architectural wet dreams. She was still working out the language of telling Wally he wouldn’t have a little brother anymore. She’d left all the kitchen drawers, all the cabinets, open.

Just one moment, nothing more. It had stopped breathing inside her. Stopped wanting to live inside her. A tiny suicide. Or homicide. She wasn’t sure which one of them had made the decision. Or maybe it was God, as one of the nurses had tried to tell her — You never know, she’d said, without my sister’s miscarriage, they never would have tried for Rachel, and she’s just the sweetest little girl. Well, God knew she’d bled through a couple of Rachels by now.

She remembered the chastity presentation at her high school. Every student had to glue together two pieces of paper — one blue, one pink. And after a few minutes, when they were told to separate the papers, to feel the difficulty of splitting what only God could join, the tearing shot through the bleachers, cacophonous. Blue shreds clung to the pink paper and pink, blue. On their first night together, the audacious diamond on her finger snagged her wedding dress, and as Adrian tried to extricate her, his clumsy hands tearing more stitches, she heard only a gymnasium full of teenage gods giggling, failing to sunder. Life’s miracles revealed mundane.

And nothing came of it. Not for years. No glue. She was supposed to produce, supposed to line the walls with children, but nothing. Some malfunction in the machinery. An inability to stick life into the world, or a worker slacking off her body’s assembly line, stealing product.

She walked into Wally’s room, still searching. She looked at his old pinewood derby cars, propped on a shelf above the dresser. Each of them with their tiny imperfections from beating against the end of the track. She didn’t think he’d ever won a race, but it was all so subjective anyway, what with the split-second the judge had to decide. A drop, a flare, an end. Once, while Adrian was fixing up Wally’s car, and Wally was asking why his own design wasn’t good enough and if it was because he was adopted, she’d overheard him tell their son that his ideas were actually worth more than the other kids because he was adopted, and that was more expensive than natural birth.

Which was the stupidest thing she’d ever heard — let alone heard told to a child. They had chosen Wally, if not a little suddenly. They’d been registered with the agency for a while, yes, but the actual baby swooped in with dizzying speed. A kid following her favorite band, pregnant on the tour, who gave a make-believe name at the hospital. As Hallie bottle-fed what, for all she knew, was some rockstar’s afterthought, her love for Wally mixed with rage and confusion. She worried he would pick up on the tumult, so she taught herself to be angry only when she wasn’t holding him: while on the toilet, or in the bath, or listening to Adrian read him his favorite bedtime stories — the huff and the puff, or the sheep’s clothing, or the boy who cried — she’d envy those who could leave whenever they wanted while refusing to do the same, despite the growing wolf in their home.

Hallie walked to the kitchen, glancing over at the flytrap. A single insect struggled to move. Her stomach wrenched again. The light streaming through the wall of windows made her nauseated, overheated. She felt like a stranger in this glass mansion, built for Adrian’s grandfather after he’d first established the factory. She didn’t understand the mechanics of what came, what stayed, and what left. Their latest attempt had been in vitro, Adrian jacking off in a plastic jar. He shouldn’t have been so rattled that she lost it. It hardly felt like his.

She found the match, finally, in the back of an already yawning drawer in the nursery. She mimicked lighting it against the side of the crib, looked around the baby’s room, fully stocked with diapers and new clothes, the planets-and-stars mobile orbiting above her head. She dropped the tiny splinter, whispered, “Whoosh.” Waved her hands like a magician.

In the flames of her imagining, she could see what the room might be: a studio for her, the walls filled with her works. She bent to pick the sliver of wood back up, and with one hand she brought it to rest under her opposite arm, between bicep and tricep. No bigger than a matchstick, the nurse had told her, while Adrian and the doctor talked in low tones. It kinda thickens everything down there. Little guys can’t swim through.

She didn’t need to tell Adrian. She’d have a bandaid for a few days, but she could say it was an early flu shot. She could take that much back from him. A few years, at least, for herself.

Jed’s car won the derby and $25 cash. Ta-daaa, he sang, brandishing the bills, and then, as his mom drove up with all his little sisters, Wally watched him take the money and disappear it in the waistband of his underwear and hike up his loose jeans. The tires crunched the gravel of the lot.

“Let’s go,” she said. “Get in.” Wally was always amazed at how many siblings Jed had. He was excited to have a little brother, even though Jed said it wouldn’t be all that fun.

Jed’s mom stopped Wally from getting in the car with a single arm, strong in its rebuke.

“My mom said to come home with Jed,” Wally said because he couldn’t think of anything else to say. His stomach still hurt.

“Not today,” she said. He looked to Jed, but his friend was staring at the ground, cheeks flushed.

“How am I gonna get home?” Wally asked.

“Buy another car,” she said, shutting the door on Jed and his sisters. Wally watched the van shrink down the road. He thought he heard the older boys behind him. His feet felt stuck to the pavement. He closed his eyes, did numbers in his head like his dad had taught him to do when he got overwhelmed. Only ever one right answer. Any number whose digits add up to a multiple of three is divisible by three. A prime number is divisible only by one and itself. Zero cannot be divided. And no number can be divided by zero. Something cannot be divided by nothing. Simple math.