He mumbled a prayer, trembled, felt his hair stand on ends. He dabbed the cold sweat forming around his brow with a wrinkled handkerchief. Oh God, he has sinned. 'Father forgive our sins and deliver us from evil.' He sat in his room, hearing the clock's nervous ticks as it circles itself again and again. The Tv flashed its eerie greenish glow. On screen footages from the site of a plane crash were showing torn metal pieces twisted into grosteque sculptures bearing blood, tears, screams and flesh of the victims of the crash. The news reporter on scene was describing the carnage, faces of distraught family members were flashed to millions of families across the world. Many sitting concerned in front of the televsion, others heard of the terrible news and looked up from whatever they were doing and for a moment shared the grief of the family members desperate for news of their loved ones. It was a terrible accident, the plane had lost control when the tail end came apart in flight causing it to spin out of control and crash onto the moutains below. No one survived from the crash. All 359 passengers on board were killed in the crash.
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He had always been a wonderful employee, Mr G loved him as he loved most of his staff. He was always punctual at the factory, he had been there for nearly twenty years now. Their company was a small one, they made small metal parts, not just your average screws, nuts and bolts but tiny minute metal exact parts for all kinds of mechanisms, they were a small firm but very professional nonetheless. Clock makers, aerospace firms cars, buses, bridges has parts produced by them. They always had their inside jokes on the things the average people did not know. Things they drive in, walk on and fly in had a tiny part which had passed through their hands. They knew their importance to the world in this small way. They prodcued millions of these tiny screws every year which were dispersed around the world to become an intimate part of people's lives. People sneer in general when these workers tell them their job. They make screws and bolts. What most forget is the role these tiny artefacts play in the bigger scheme of things. They, a group of unsung heroes were proud of their job.
The trouble began when Mr G suffered a minor stroke and passed on his whole business to his son. Now, the son was an ivy league student, born with more than a silver spoon in his mouth; he had a whole silver ware enough for ten course meals. Everything in life came easy for him such that he had no empathy nor sympathy for needs, weaknesses and mistakes. He was one of those blessed few who had everything yet because of their gifts had a deep sense of cruelty etched onto their beings. He had never failed, and he did not expect other people to fail him. He thought the workers coarse, uneducated and ignorant. He had no appreciation for the bloke jokes they loved to share at work, nor their flexible work schedule. His university education taught him efficiency, management, production quotas, time tables, all in shades of grey , cold and rigid like the tables and digits he was familiar with. First came the factory bells to keep workers on time, then came mechanisation, new workers and then the 'damned' restructuring. The valued old workers suddenly found themselves old men with no education kept on in the company only for old time's sake and was made to feel exactly that way about their presence in the workplace where they had sweated day after day for more than twenty years of their lives.
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The idea came when Old Chang got drunk. He had in his giddy state raised the idea for resistance and rebellion. If, he had declared standing on the table at the pub, they could not shock and awe in retaliation, they can always revenge themselves by carrying out subtle sabotages. First, the bell at the factory malfunctioned for mysterious reasons. Next, machines started breaking down giving the young Mr G, eager to prove his worth and assert his status, headaches. They started exchanging secretive glances at lunch, and good jokes on their new mission at their after work drinks. Mr G junior was not in the dark in regards to the series of unfortunate incidents in his factories. A cold war was silently declared in the factory. Pay cuts started happening. Hints of dismissal, lengthened work hours were his response to the sabotages.
Sometimes, unhappiness can drive a man to do things he normally would never even imagine himself to, causing him to betray his own principles, cloud his vision blind him with frustration. That was the day, one of the new workers had mistakenly produced a batch of screws short in length by a minute degree. He had spotted the mistake but in a fit of anger and a feeling of justified outrage, he had let the batch pass him by unstopped. He remembered a distinct feeling of sweet revenge, a satisfaction of getting even. He had since then clean forgotten the incident, the event was lost in a jumble of memory like a small stone sunken into oblivion in the depth of his mind.
Then, by chance he had switched on the television to see the scene of distraught and tragic loss of human lives and desperate relatives looking for loved ones on the fatal flight. His deed in that moment of rage resurfaced from the deep dark corner of his mind. He thought of the possibility of the tragedies his act might have wrought or is waiting to bear fruit somewhere, under cars and people's feet, as screws holding lives together and how that short degree would make the difference between life and death. How one of the screws might have found its way onto the flight he was seeing on television, how misery had a mysterious connection between all people of the world. He wept bitter tears and cried to the heavens for a sign of forgiveness. Somewhere else millions of miles away, a woman is crying for her lost son, asking the heavens for an explanation of her grief. Sorrow found a community miles away each in his isolated bitterness. Those suffering searched in desperation for a sign that they were not alone, but the night was silent except for the suffocated tears.
