Note: another piece based on this
The window is his television. He'll pull up a chair, watch fighting cats for entertainment and clouds for the weather. He knows this view, it is imprinted on his soul from all the years and years he has spent watching it in his old faded deck chair with a cold beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other.
Every morning comes the first examination, when he's first woken up and is still bleary-eyed wandering around the house in his boxers. He checks--sky, seam, scar. The change leaps out at him so greatly that at first he thinks he is still dreaming, or that there's something in his eye obstructing his sight and this is not what he knows it is.
There is a long white glistening line, it hangs down from the sky and sways slightly in the wind. As it moves more of the stitching is undone and the thread trails closer and closer to the floor. He stares at it as the severity of the situation settles. A curse slips from his mouth, and he grabs box of cigarettes before stumbling out of his apartment and down the stairs.
There are lumps on the peddles of his bicycle and they dig into his bare feet as he rides down the street, the cold chilling his chest, boxer shorts flapping in the wind. He knows he shouldn't but takes a detour anyway. The spinner is not a long cycle from the trailing thread and the welling curiosity, the what does it look like? is too much to resist.
He held the thread once, when it was still raw and fluff, before it had been woven into the thick strong rope. That experience clashes discordantly with this and he can hardly bring himself to imagine that they are made of the same thing. The thread swings and collides the side of an office block tearing out glass and concrete to expose its steel bones. Then it falls, trailing on the ground across the streets to the other side, upturned tarmac and paving slaps left in its path.
He's not the only one watching, there are three others huddled around the corner, flinching and crying out whenever they hear another smash.
"Has this ever happened before?" One, a skeletal young girl asks, so frail he thinks that even the sound of destruction could break her fragile fairy bones.
"Once. Twice. Not like this, never this far," he tells her as he holds a bent and crumpled cigarette between his teeth only to remember he has no lighter.
"Can it be fixed?"
"I hope so," he sighs and swings a leg back over his saddle, "I'll do my best."
She nods in understanding, wailing and covering her face at the sound of shattering glass.
He pedals hard, fast. The muscles in his calf sting and ache, telling him he should have eaten breakfast, should have gotten dressed.
There's already someone waiting for him when he reaches the spinner, hysterical and distraught. Even off his bike he's still running, up and around the spiralled staircase that curls around the crane's legs and to the control centre.
"We lost three month's work," she tells him with tears rolling down her face, "the needle has snapped and even if we replaced it we can't reach that far."
"We'd need to move back," he mutters quietly, "is the last site still available?"
"They've build something on it. They thought it was safe land."
He bursts into the control room and grabs the lighter waiting at his desk, bent cigarette still wedged in the side his mouth.
"You not supposed to smoke in here," she says quietly, and he shoots her a dark glare.
"May, I think health and safety is the least of our worries."
He blows out a pillow of smoke to taunt her and turns his attention to the damage. The broken needle was the least of his worries, they'd gone a long while since the last one had been replaced that it was about time for a change anyway.
"Has anyone tried to reel back what we can?"
"No. Neither of us can work the manual, we were hoping you could," a chair swivels round, and a surprised eyebrow arcs at the state of his undress.
"I can do it, Rhys, but I think this situation is a case for the builders. Call them. See if we can get something portable," he says, pushing open the latch that leads to the roof.
A sharp gale startles him, knocks him back onto the heels of his feet and the handrail is all that saves him from falling back down to the ground below. The roof is where the needle lays, spool of thread at its side. He braces himself and takes hold of a cold metal crank, spitting his cigarette out as he begins to turn. He knows why neither May nor Rhys will do this with their small light frames. Three full turns and the weight builds up, arms heavy as he turns the great mass. They may have lost so much work in such a little time, but he is determined to try and salvage as much of their precious thread as possible.
He keeps going. Turning the wheel around and around and seeing dirty used fibres curl around the fresh and virgin. May comes up with a cup of coffee and holds it against his lips while he works.
A sharp hiss. His hands slip from the crank as the end of the thread flicks up into the air and whips across his legs leaving a bright red bloody mark. May sees bone and screams. Rhys hears her and pulls himself up out of the hatch and sees what she sees and shouts "Jacob! Jacob!"
His eyes close with the overwhelming desire to sleep, the ache in his arms urging him on. It feels so cold and remembers that he is just in his boxers, and makes a mental note that the next time this happens, he should probably get dressed first.
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I'm flailing over the use of names. I really didn't want to use any at all, but then there'd be more confusion between Jacob and Rhys, and Jacob kinda needs to be named in this part so that one of the others makes more sense. So I'm a little worried that the names just sound like they've been taked on, so if you could especially give me your opinions on that, it would be more than awsome.
