Tales from Glasstown - Prologue
No tolerance for negligence
Two men were carrying wooden crates full of glassware. They were in line with fellow workers, each one with a crate between their arms. At the end of the line, they would lay their crate for a huge man to inspect. After glancing at the cups, plates, statuettes, the huge man would either send the worker away or use his whip.
The two men were chatting in a low voice. Their words were muffled by the background noises of the factory.
"You sure he won't notice the crack in that one pot?" asked the younger man.
"He won't if, you don't hand him the crate with that guilty puppy face of yours!" hissed the older man. His face was scarred in multiple places, his shoulders curved with the weight of early old age.
"You're right, you're right. I just need to relax, and everything goes fine," said the younger man, more to himself than to his colleague.
Their turn to deliver their daily quota came. The older one went first. His younger colleague thought this to be an act of kindness, a last attempt to shield him from the scrutiny of the guard. In truth, the older man just felt things wouldn't turn out so smoothly and didn't want to meet the guard right after his colleague.
The guard looked at the old man's crate, grunted, and pointed him away with his chin. The old man felt lighter, took his crate, and disappeared in the shadows of the factory's corridors without turning back. He realised he was almost running away from the scene.
Still, he heard the whip hitting soft flesh and the scream of the young man pleading mercy.
The young man was laying on the floor, almost unconscious. Rivulets of blood were slowly descending across his face to disappear in a small, red pool that sprang across the man's cheek, like a mountain spring emerging from a wall of rocks.
The whip had drawn an irregular wound across the young man's face, almost dividing it into two equal parts. Soon, the young man would regain full consciousness, and the pain would come.
For the present moment, however, he felt nothing. He was oblivious to the screams of the workers coming immediately after him, each one found guilty of negligence by the ever-searching gaze of the now-upset guard.
The young man heard nothing. He felt only the warm caress of a ray of light, which was filtering from a crack in the old factory's high roof.
As if nothing else mattered, the young man's thoughts idly drifted around the sun. He remembered his late mother's favorite saying:
It's always sunny in Glasstown.