Shadow Factory By Kip Knott

Judith Jackson CC



Shadow Factory

        The factory’s lone worker never clocks in late, even though the doors have been shuttered for nearly three decades. Like most of the storefront windows along Main Street in Naughtonville, a town that blossomed like a flower out of cinders during the factory’s heyday, the windows of the factory were all shot out long ago. Truth be told, it was mostly the townsfolk who did the shooting when they left forever to find a new dream to latch onto. 
        That was twenty-seven years ago. On sunny days now, the shadow of the condemned, mostly hollow factory moves slowly across the weedy field it inhabits, the way a ghost retraces its steps as it tries to puzzle out exactly why it was cursed to walk the earth for eternity. And it’s on these sunny days that Hugh, the last inhabitant of Naughtonville, stands in one of the bright spaces of the factory’s shadow that demarcates the place where a window used to be. 
        Unlike most of the town’s former inhabitants, Hugh didn’t have a family to provide for by the time the factory shut down, so he never felt the need to leave. Hugh was a confirmed bachelor who lived with his parents and accepted early on that he was destined, like his father, to spend his life working in the factory. His father had died several years before in the boiler explosion that halted all work for two weeks. That day marked the real beginning of the end for the factory, though it did manage to hang on—for better or worse—another eight years. Hugh’s mother didn’t even last a full day after the funeral. When Hugh went down for breakfast the next morning, he found her dead at the kitchen table, a cup of steaming coffee in front of her and a lit cigarette still in her mouth left to smoke itself. After attending two funerals in less than seven days, Hugh was the first worker to clock in when the factory reopened a week later, more than glad to lose himself in the repetition of a job that he felt liberated his mind to travel to places he knew he could never afford to visit. 
        Even now, all these years later, Hugh is more than glad for sunny days so he can take his place within that rectangle of light on the ground enveloped by the shadow of the factory. And just as he did in the past, Hugh still performs the ritual of clocking in before he shuffles through the motions of operating the machine that his father taught him to man more than forty years before. It is during these sunlit shifts that Hugh finds his mind free to travel back to a time when the rhythm of the factory was the music that the town danced to every day and all through the night. And when the shadow of the factory drifts and stretches beyond the field and into the woods that has grown up where the parking lot used to be, Hugh reluctantly clocks out and heads back with his wares to the home he has never quite gotten used to living alone in, even this long after the deaths of his parents. 
         These days, all Hugh is able to make during his shifts at the factory are shadows, which suits him fine. Hugh never really cared about what he made; for him, it was all about the making. In fact, Hugh has become so good at his job that in just a few hours on a sunny day, he can manufacture enough shadows to make the walk home more of a trudge due to the burden of his load. But Hugh doesn’t mind the weight that he carries; he is just happy to be working in the factory at all, the one place that has always given him a purpose, a reason for being. 
       When he gets home today after a particularly productive shift, Hugh tosses the shadows he made onto the ever-growing pile of shadows that has filled nearly every inch of his house. Hugh has promised himself to keep on working every day the Sun permits, even though he knows that each shift brings him one shift closer to retirement. All Hugh has to do is to look around him to know that it won’t be much longer before the number of shadows will finally become one shadow too many to live with.



Kip Knott is a writer, photographer, and part-time art dealer who travels the back roads of the Midwest and Appalachia in search of lost art treasures. His writing has appeared in Best Microfiction and The Wigleaf Top 50. His most recent book of stories, Family Haunts, is available from Louisiana Literature Press. You can follow him on Instagram at @kip.knott.
​