Best for:
Blue-collar workers & laborers who feel the grind, healthcare workers and nursing staff, critics of late-stage capitalism, readers of industrial horror and dystopian fiction, those who feel like a “cog in the machine,” and anyone grappling with the fear of aging and obsolescence in a productivity-obsessed world.
The Scars of Fitting In:
This piece is the fourth of the ten piece collection of short stories, that I am currently working on. I will continue to share these periodically across my platforms, including WordPress, Substack, Wattpad, and other publishing spaces.
Each story in this series stands alone, but together they form a broader examination of the systems that shape us.
These works are released intentionally over time, allowing space for reflection rather than consumption.
This series blends literary fiction with social commentary and psychologically thrilling concepts. Here I spend time focusing on lived experience, psychological impact, and the long shadow of making decisions for others . New entries will be published as they are completed.
Blurb:
The story follows a factory worker who spends his time at work bottling consumer goods and monitoring “underproductive individuals” also known as humans who have replaced animals in the testing wings.
At one point he watches a man react to some of the very chemicals he caps on the line. At last the narrator realizes he isn’t just an observer. He is a battery running out of charge, and the factory is simply waiting for his shelf life to expire.
The Shelf Life of Productive Individuals;
The commute to the factory is always in a grayscale hue, this is a fact that never fails to come true. The forty-minute stretch where my mind attempts to build a wall between the two separate versions of me. One version consists of a man who eats toast in a dim kitchen decorated in hues of yellow and blue; the other version signs for shipments of humans to run production safety test on using their hair and skin.
Each and every morning, the parking lot at the testing facility feels like a graveyard for the living. It shivers through my bones as I approach the cemetery for the breathing, working bodies.
Our shift change is something similar to a silent ritual. You walk past the outgoing crew, and there is a shared, hollow look in all of our eyes. This look is a mutual agreement not to acknowledge the screaming contradiction of our “Humane First” posters.
The company rebranded the previous animal testing wing as the Ethical Non-Animal-Testing Zone. This rebrand brought the posters of playful pups, kittens doing cute things, rabbits, monkeys you name it all showing the bright futures an animal now can have without fear of testing.
They stripped the cages out three years ago when the laws changed.
Gone were the self watering bottles and the feeders on timers. Now, there are cots as well as a few mess halls. There are privacy screens that don’t actually offer much in the way of privacy and, there are personal care items for the nursing staff to use. Though I should also note we are not supposed to refer to them as nursing staff they are “test subject techs” or TST’s.
During the first week of the transition, my internal monologue was more defensive:
The animals are safe, the voiceless are no longer allowed to be abused.
These underproductive individuals (as we were told to refer to them before the test subject verbiage was introduced) were at least they’re being fed.
They are also being kept warm, and out of the elements.
But the defense is a thin lacquer, and it’s peeling.
By the second Tuesday, the smell of the new “Morning Moss” “Ace” body wash being tested on Wing B had become a daily migraine inducer. Walking the line, my eyes keep betraying our new protocols.
For instance our new employee handbook told us to only look at the test subjects Application Site, and specifically not their faces. But the face of Subject 00005 is a map of a life I recognize.
This man has the same deep creases around his mouth as I. Lines he got probably from a lifetime of frowning into the sun. He has the universal “factory slouch” the curvature of the spine that comes from decades of being a human bracket for a machine.
In the back of my head though the corporate training video whispered the reminder, “He’s not smart or strong enough. This is a person capitalism can’t make anything from.” The thoughts loop during the drive home, rhythmic with my windshield wipers.
Capitalism can’t make anything from him. It’s a lie. They are making plenty. They are making data points on dermal toxicity and allergic reactions. They are harvesting the only thing he has left: his physical body.
Then the following night, standing in front of the bathroom mirror at home, my internal processing turned inward. Becoming something more sharp and clinical than ever before. My reflection is a catalog of “Under-Productivity.”
The graying now spreads through my entire beard. The way my breath hitches after climbing a set of stairs or a steep hill. The slow, creeping onset aging of a man who spent his youth filling and lifting boxes that are now moved by a robotic arm.
I am a surplus human, the thought lands with a sickening thud.
The fear isn’t that I’ll lose this job; the fear is that I’ll qualify for the next one.
That one morning, my badge won’t beep at the turnstile, and the HR manager will lead me not to an alternate exit, but to a cot.
That Thursday’s shift was my breaking point. Its final tipping point was the sensory overlap. A test subject in Wing C, a man about fifty, wearing a faded wedding band that he refused to take off.
Was having a reaction to a high-concentrate antiperspirant. His skin was an angry, and violent, weeping red… mess. He never uttered one complain. He just sat there with his eyes closed, breathing in the same synthetic “Cool Mountain” scent that I’ve been bottling for twenty years.
The realization came in a cold, drenching wave.
I am not the observer.
I am the precursor.
Every bottle I cap on the production line is a potential chemical burn for the individuals on the cots, and every hour I spend aging at my station brings me closer to sitting where they are.
We are pieces of the same closed loop. The factory creates the product, the factory creates the “unproductive” worker, and the factory uses the latter to validate the former.
The drive home on Friday morning is a silent one.
No radio.
No distractions.
The sandalwood and synthetic moss cling to the fabric of the seats in my Honda, a funeral shroud of consumer goods. Pulling into the driveway, my house looks too small, almost fragile.
I look at my hands on the steering wheel. They are steady, but they feel heavy, as if the clipboard is already being replaced by the weight of a test patch.
My mental struggle is no longer about “them or us.”
It’s the terrifying realization that in a world where a body must be a battery or a lab rat, I am just a battery that is running out of charge.
Eventually we all will become the lab rat.
I stay in the car long after the engine has cooled, watching my neighborhood’s lights flicker on.
I begin to wonder which of my neighbors are still “productive,” and how many of us are just waiting for our shelf life to expire.
Before you leave:
Thank you for reading the fourth story in the “Scars of Fitting in” series. This piece explores the terrifying intersection of labor and human value.
I hope this look into the “closed loop” of the factory gave you something to think about.
Maybe it even echoed something within your own experience. Be looking out for more stories like this and others that I will be released periodically across WordPress, Substack, Wattpad, Quotev, Inkitt, and other platforms.
These shorts will each explore the outside forces that work to shape us.
Please feel free to follow along, and check back soon to continue this collection and others grow. With Poeaxtry there is always more to come.
If you feel moved to do so please comment below and tell me what you think.
Did you hate this? Maybe you loved it?
Did it leave you somewhere in between?
I’d love to know more about what you think, no hard feelings I promise.
Tell me have you ever felt like a “surplus human” in our current system?
How would you react if you realized your job was just a countdown to becoming the subject?
If you wouldn’t mind consider sharing “Shelf Life of Productive Individuals” with someone who might resonate with this look at the cost of modern productivity. Or even your friend who just likes to read psychological thrillers.
Keep an eye out for the next entry in, “The Scars of Fitting In.”
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