Traffic lights flashed slow yellow
            over intersections where no one

crossed paths at that time of night.
            Yield in every direction. Vacant Walmart

parking lot looked haunted, where faint spirits
            drifted under fluorescent lamp posts,

but if you looked close enough, it was
            just August air thick with humidity.

Most households were turned down for the night
            as I drove through the streets

that I could navigate
            with my eyes closed.

Everything felt exotic in the dark
            with no one around.

Police cruisers followed me,
            running my plates for priors

or outstanding warrants. Analyzing my driving
            for signs of intoxication

which was commonplace
            not long before midnight.

The message was clear,
            I wasn’t supposed to be there.

Anyone on the streets at that hour
            was suspect somehow.

Thread the needle of driving
            under the speed limit but not so slow

I made my avoidance apparent. No rolling
            stops at stop signs. Gave the bored patrol

no reason to pull me over and find
            the weed in the glove compartment.

Mine was an inverted existence
            where night was my day and day was night,

working third shift as a temp at the plastics factory
            for the summer. Time and my place in it

wasn’t clear or linear. I was a tourist
            wandering through lives in progress.

In a few weeks, I would be gone
            on my way wherever

my unfolding path would lead.
            This is why no one bothered

to learn my name.
            Most of the skeleton crew

looked exhausted
            before the shift started.

Still, we had eight mind-numbing hours ahead.
            The brittle thin couple, Amy and Jim,

were androgynous, interchangeable.
            They could pass for twin mannequins

except they walked and talked.
            They were already tweaking

and fidgeting. Most nights,
            they crashed before lunch.

We formed a crescent moon
            around Bill, our mumbling shift manager,

who looked as wrinkled and threadbare
            as his faded flannel shirt.

If Dr. Jekyll had kept a menagerie
            of Mr. Hydes under his skin

and they took turns on the carousel
            of his consciousness, this would be Bill.

There were as many versions of him
            as there were flavors of alcohol

or varieties of narcotics.
            Tonight, it was ‘Pills Bill’

who appeared when we clocked in
            then disappeared until dawn.

What reaction is justified after you reach
            the arduous peak of your life

only to realize you were scaling
            a mountain of garbage?

All of this was according to employees
            who mocked Bill,

gossiped in the parking lot,
            and snickered as he called out

who would work each press for the night.
            There was no winning or losing,

all of the machines were equally
            tedious and soul-erasing.

Each decrepit press was kept on life support
            well beyond its intended lifespan.

They labored heavily as if running in place
            with a collapsed lung.

As each machine gave up the ghost
            an alarm would ring

like a heartbeat flatlining on a monitor.
            With each mechanical breakdown,

a voice that sounded like a refrigerator
            thrown down a flight of stairs

erupted in a stream of obscenities.
            You could hear the fury of a life wasted

patching together so many things
            that wanted to stay broken,

machines or otherwise. Watching that fucking boulder
            roll down the same goddamn hill

again and again. Todd, the third-shift mechanic,
            was a perpetual ball of rail-thin, grease-covered,

speed-addled, balding rage menacing the factory floor
            like a schoolyard bully in steel-toed boots.

The ever-present wrench in his white-knuckled fist
            always looked like a weapon.

Each press was an unwilling Lazarus
            dragged back to life night after night.

Less a savior, Todd was more of a masochist.
            If machines could feel anything,

they would have a shared sense of impermanence
            with those of us who occupied the assembly lines.

Together we forged hot plastic
            in the shape of big gulp cups.

All summer, all of us made
            low-quality promotional plastic products

for an animated movie no one remembers,
            sold at a burger chain no longer in operation.

Everything we made was disposable
            detritus that had no value

and now overflows landfills.
            Anyway, Candy would say, it’s a paycheck.

Who gives a shit where this garbage goes?
            Someone is going to make it,

and might it as well be her.
            She was behind on bills,

and her car needed a catalytic converter.
            And they didn’t do drug screenings,

which is an invasion of fucking privacy
            by the way, she reminded me frequently.

What she does in her free time
            is none of their goddamn business.

She walked out to Kyla’s Ford Focus
            where they smoked meth during lunch.

Alone in my Mercury Comet,
            I ate a baloney sandwich and sparked a joint.

The sun would rise in a few hours. I would
            be gone in a few weeks,

back to state college. Blue-collar, free-lunch,
            food-stamps kid who sold plasma

twice a week to pay for textbooks
            and worked at factories

over breaks to pay tuition. During that long,
            exhausting summer, I felt

misplaced in the world. I was a tourist
            everywhere. I didn’t belong anywhere.

Inside the other parked cars,
            red tips of cigarette cherries

glowed in the dark.
            Smoke rolled out of the windows.

Faces gazed out into the night.
            Small embers pulsed with each deep inhale,

thinking about whatever other people think about
            at three in the morning, alone in their car,

when the August heat
            doesn’t relent even at night,

just like everything else that stalked
            in the dark at the edges

of the yellow lamp post light.
            One moment of turbulent peace

before heading back
            into the belly of the rusted beast.

At four in the morning, time contorted.
            Early morning hours elongated

like taffy sagging in the middle as it stretches.
            The second half of third shift

always felt twice as long
            as the first half.

Mixed with moderate insobriety, the monotonous
            sound of the machines became a rhythm

that lulled anyone into a dulled existence between
            waking dream and sleepwalking reality.

Operating a press for hours was muscle memory,
            rhythm, and timing. Nothing to do with skill.

Close the metal door, open the metal door,
            pull out eight hot plastic cups,

place them in a box, close the door, open the door,
            hot plastic cups, stack in boxes,

open, cups, box, close, open, cups,
            box, close, open, close, open,

close, open, cups, box, close, open, cups,
            box, close, open, close, open,

close, open, close, open, close, open,
            close, open, cups, box, close.

Urban legend said if you disturb a sleepwalker
            mid-dream, they would be shocked awake

and have a heart attack. This is not true.
            Otherwise, we would have all been casualties

scattered across the factory floor when the bell rang
            at the end of our shift every night.

We walk fatigued out of the building. Jolted
            by sunrise, fresh air that wasn’t toxic,

and a rush of nicotine from the first drag
            off the first cigarette in hours.

Cicadas were already stirring up their singing.
            Low hum in the morning

with a deafening assault in the afternoon.
            As scheduled, their brood returned

after seventeen years.
            Staring through her thick sunglasses,

Candy said, Jesus Christ, has it been seventeen years?
            I started working at this fucking place last time

those disgusting bugs covered everything.
            I was a temp worker like you, she said looking at me.

During the summer of the previous Brood X,
            Kyla married that cheating piece of shit Rick.

But that was a great summer, she said,
            nothing like this one.

In unison, a dozen cars pulled out of the parking lot.
            Morning traffic was flowing

in the opposite direction. Nothing exotic
            about driving home at sunrise.

The Walmart parking no longer looked haunted.
            Daylight had exchanged one kind of ghost for another.

No cops followed me home.
            They were perched

under overpasses hunting
            for speeders on the interstate.

I smoked one last joint before pulling up
            to the duplex rental across from the county jail.

I met my father as he opened the front door,
            framed like staring into a mirror

that reflected a future
            that waited at the end

of a long road of difficult circumstances
            and bad choices.

You’ll never know
            which ones are the bad ones

until it’s too late.
            He nodded and said there is still coffee

as he headed out for first shift
            at the driveshaft factory.

Rinsed off and laid down, I listened
            to the rattle of the electric gate

across the street, open and close as cops
            ended and started their shifts.

Woke mid-afternoon in a haze, unsure
            if it was morning or evening. All summer,

I existed outside of time and inside a future
            that was already waiting,

all I had to do was nothing
            and it was ready to begin.

Like learning how to drown;
            just stop moving

my arms and legs, don’t panic
            as the surface disappears.

Or chose to swim until I lose sight
            of the shore, until I have no choice

but to keep swimming
            out into the bottomless dark.

Joseph Kerschbaum’s most recent publications include Mirror Box (Main St Rag Press, 2020) and Distant Shores of a Split Second (Louisiana Literature Press, 2018). His recent work has appeared in Reunion: The Dallas Review, Hamilton Stone Review, The Inflectionist Review, Main Street Rag, In Parentheses, and Umbrella Factory. Joseph lives in Bloomington, Indiana, with his family.