key word "inundated" title "oil can" in misc. flash fiction

What do you do when you find that you’ve been rusted into place? What do you do when you’ve lost so much of yourself you don’t even know who you are anymore? Piece by piece replaced, in big chunks and in little over days and years, until you may as well be someone or something else entirely? What do you call yourself then, if your mouth can even creak open wide enough to still speak at all?

And yes, of course, we’re all going to rust out, all of us from time to time, metal or flesh or spirit or magic or anything, there’s just too much of this oxygen floating around. We are inundated by oxygen every day, it’s in the very air we breathe, you might say. We take it in and it keeps us alive, our blood carries it all about us inside, letting our cells allow us to strive. When anything burns, whether it’s coal or a tree or a bundle of straw in the cornfield, it only does so because oxygen allows it to do so. Oxygen heats up our dinners by day, it warms up our houses by night, yes, this primal element does for us the most wonderful things.

Oxygen does terrible things as well, of course, and sometimes even more often. It bonds to itself high up in the sky in a clod to melt all our ice. It throws off the balance of ions in our very own genes, aging and sickening us, accelerating all our unavoidable fates. Oxygen’s fire burns down ancient forests and Kansas farmhouses and sometimes even the great bejeweled cities when left unchecked. Oxygen rusts. The very air that we breathe gloms onto iron when the thin layer of tin protecting it wears away and it reacts until everything’s dull-orange, ugly and brittle, corroding it all away into nothing.

Oxygen gives us life. Oxygen kills. Oxygen takes the impenetrable armor you’ve replaced nearly all of yourself with and it just laughs at it. Oxygen merges with your defenses and breaks them all down into motionless burnt-umber dust and all the power you thought that you had cannot fix it. Cannot make you whole. Cannot let your joints know for motivation. You’ll need outside help now, you will need at least a little lubrication. You can never, just by your sheer will, reclaim the ability to move again but maybe with the help of oil you can. Maybe oil can. Oil can. Oil can.

So, what do you do when you find that you’ve been rusted into place? You wait. Sometimes all you can do is just wait there, at the curb of the lane, standing still in your place. You stand like a statue and you wait, and you hope and you pray that maybe some girl will come down the road and help you figure out how to move again. How to live again. How to find your long-lost heart.

Last updated May 02, 2018