The lumbering man had machines on his back. A hodgepodge of industrials, conglomerate together, weighed him down, down, down. Phoebe cried metallic tears that dried as cast-iron encrustations. She stopped for the man on the side of the street. She gave him a glance, he gave her a nod; the moment seemed perfectly organic.

Phoebe lived in an apartment on Tumbler Street that was hexagonal like a bolt. She worked in a small appliance factory on Filter Avenue. Both had egg-white walls and fluorescents that flickered like fireflies. Being surrounded by six even walls made Phoebe flustered. Too many pictures on the walls. Too many walls. Too many. Too much. Just too much.

Phoebe bought a camera with her biweekly pay. Her diet for the next fourteen days would consist of salted crackers, a bag of old, sticky raisins, and whatever her neighbors could spare. The reality of the situation was that she would live.

She owned one pair of black denim jeans and one squalid white t-shirt. Both started in the cotton field where a large cultivating tractor tore them from the stalks like souls from bodies. The Gins separated fiber from seed and a compressor compacted the fibers together into a two-ton brick of white, white, white. Those bricks were shipped to the mill where they were separated hastily and spun by rows of a state-of-the-art-apparatus, which utilized miniature cyclones, into miles and miles of threads. Those threads on spools were woven by a bobbing loom that needed no manual operator into sheets of fabric soft to the touch yet cold in soul. The cloth product was then dyed or not dyed before it was cut by machine and then sewn into garments by foreign women looking for a living wage in a stifling hot room. Those jeans and that t-shirt have molded themselves to Phoebe’s body. They clutched her skin.

But it was winter now; so on top of these cotton creations, Phoebe closed herself off in a derelict pea coat. She looked like Joan of Arc in the woolen armor, only much less inspired and in desperate need of a seizure. But if the people could be roused, who would give her the chance of rousing?

She trailed behind the lumbering man for days, capturing him in all his rusting existence when she wasn’t at work. The camera shutter blinked at him but he never blinked back, as if he had no eye lids, as if he were some fish. But the only fish Phoebe had ever known were in a tin on one Easter morning. Her child tongue took no liking to their taste. In one week, she had used up all of her film, all of her exposures. The store she bought the camera from developed the film and made enlarged prints. Another day or two without food. She would live.

Phoebe was frozen staring at the industrials. She hugged a large, glossy envelope close to her chest. She hadn’t looked at any of the images herself. She didn’t know if they were any good. She didn’t particularly care. But now that she had them, she had no clue what to do with them. Her rabbit heart seemed to think this was the best choice, but the industrials, the weathered, clanking, corroded, steaming industrials, were making her gasp for air. There was hardly enough oxygen already in the city, but the industrials of the lumbering man struck a cord. She reached out a pathetic, trembling arm and tapped him on the shoulder (if that was his shoulder, it was hard to tell) with a pale, bony finger. He turned around, or rather, pivoted around on the axis of his left foot so that his body faced towards the street and his industrials were muttering to some cylinder of an abandoned office building, but his head, his face, was crooked right at her. His lidless eyes acknowledged her, just as entitled as they were pathetic.

Phoebe was fluttering, her chest quivered in the free space of her pea coat. It would have taken her at least a week for her to hand him the envelope, white like a Communion wafer, if he hadn’t met her halfway. His stubby, meaty fingers grabbed the package delicately. He turned its flap upwards and removed the prints with precision. The lumbering man stood there for thirty minutes examining each image intently; Phoebe stood there for thirty minutes watching him examine his gift. When he was finished, he dropped the prints, the images, on to the sordid pavement, into a gray clouded puddle, and seized her right wrist, almost crushing it.

Phoebe gasped and made to run away but he was anchored by weight. He kept his grip and pulled her into himself. She turned, almost fell, but he caught her so that they both faced the street and he was embracing her waist. At first, she stiffened, but then she came to and held his arms in place with hers. The lumbering man pressed his face into her back and Phoebe’s eyes swelled with her metallic tears.