John

He had never given much thought to life; pitching and rolling in rhythm with its tempers and simply basking in the warmth of his existence. He had reached the point when his progression became a choice, when the hands and voices that guided and cajoled him had first drifted and then vanished and he had settled to this life. He was part of something bigger but the scope of it reached neither his curiosity nor the small corner, in the depths of the plant, where he spent his time. He needed only the timeless silver radio that had its own tempers and the constant of the tight hinge on the outer office door; an accidental comfort to the promise of toxicity in the pipes outside. Those with more or less indifference had come and gone, as had the labels on the pipes and the machines which surrounded him; but he maintained. He watched for leaks and defects, kept the numbers in their proper places and the dials on which he read them clean and operational and a hundred other tasks in their various routines. He had learned each new machine, each upgrade and adaptation as he had learned to be a husband and father; his understanding of life fleshed out in his fastidiousness for the mechanics of the science he could not have fathomed. He continued to float on the gentle breezes and to weather the storms; trudging on nights and days the mile to snatch a cigarette by the recycling bins at the entrance to the site - an often solitary symbol to the endurance and the finality of things.
Someone came to deliver a new computer, hampered as they entered by the heavy hinge and the air-lock it created with the inner door; a now jaded joke that had once attracted his occasional humour. The office he suddenly noticed, as a man finally clattered through the second door with an even larger machine than the one he had; his living quarters for innumerable years showed no sign of him. The place had at one time seemed like a dark, fantasy cave with walls built of the twisted wreckage of a thousand obsolete fittings and the guts of vats and vents long forgotten. Now in the decays of time and progression he was left with static and infinite forms, the few scattered tools he still required and an upgraded computer now to match his increasing simplification. He had his final cigarette that evening, the rain washing over him as noticeably as a morning’s mists as he marked his habitual pleasure and stared out and beyond; the deftly crafted cigarette at his lip hanging as effortlessly as his shoulders. The turning headlights from a tanker, catching the heavy rain and scouring the car-park, flashed over him; for a moment capturing him in the spinning wind and water against the turning earth and the bins for plastic bottles and cans. He closed his eyes to the glare of the spotlight, not much of anything as he stood but more than nothing in the passing light.