Moult

He had a head of hair like a hedgehog, brown spikes held down by an old flattop cap. He owned a factory that spent the day pumping fumes, gritty and dark, up into the sky, filling the lungs of the children who worked there. We were partners in this enterprise, he ran the business whilst I spent the days spending the profits, drawing in more investors by the hour.

Almost everyone who saw the factory at work immediately saw the need of it, what grander a task could mankind have on this earth? One or two however were more… apprehensive regarding it, believing it an unnecessary waste of resources and labour that benefited no one. However, not long after we always managed to convince them of its value, its grand and universal, yet personal, purpose.

I had long wished to see the great work myself, to touch it, experience it first-hand with my own mind. But could I break the thing’s magic and cast it into the ether, ruining centuries of toil just for my own satisfaction? No. I had held out, waiting for final touches to cool onto the shell. Now my reward was soon to leave behind its womb and take us all into itself, the final testament written with our own bodies.

Now, as I watched the last child fed through the doors, I smiled. I would be the last, I would see the culmination of centuries of work in only a few hours.

Smoke from the chimneys surrounded me, spiralling by my face in curls and flights in such a way that I almost lost myself, as so many others had, in the patterns of its passing. It was beautiful, dark and passionate, burning still as fell from above to fill me and leave me.

I spent my last hours with that smoke and its spirals made me smile all the more. What more could someone want with so little left aside from these streets, and the factory stretching in front of me.

But before me now the factory walls cracked like a spider’s moulting shell and out spilled the final work.

Now, the world’s work was done.