The factory died two years after my father punched out for the last time. One moved to Mexico, the other to a ceramic urn inside a curio cabinet. Management chose to auction off the hydraulic presses, forklifts, welders, and other equipment to local companies and the public. A blue light special for the blue collar crowd.

I stood in the parking lot, the same one Dad pulled into and out of for over thirty years. I wasn’t sure which rectangle belonged to him. A man of sameness and routine, I’m certain he steered the Malibu into the same spot every time. Once he was comfortable with something, his loyalty was secured.

The former largest employer in town was reduced to a concrete skeleton, its innards gutted like a grocery store hours before a hurricane hits. The mountain of free junk out back didn’t have what I wanted. I figured his beloved stool would be impossible to find. Instead, I snatched a newish one and threw it in the trunk.

At home, I took a box cutter and slashed at the vinyl seat like a strung out, back-alley surgeon. Next, I grabbed a hammer and went after the metal legs. Finished by bandaging the wounds with duct tape to make it almost whole again. Now it resembled the stool in my head, the one at the heart of most dinner conversations. Every story he told about work shared a theme: I was sitting at my station, bored and possibly frostbitten, daydreaming about your mom’s snowstorm painting. I sat there and watched Erik destroy seven roach coach cheeseburgers. I sat down and said screw it, the union won’t do anything. That was his job for ten hours, sitting and staring into the mouth of a machine as it stamped parts for kitchen appliances at 47 revolutions per minute.

In my younger days, I thought he lacked ambition and general labor was his ceiling. Other neighborhood fathers worked in offices and wore dress shirts, power ties and slick shoes. They loved healthy bank accounts. Dad loved treading water. I never told him how I felt, but the attitude I tossed around was a symptom of all that sitting.

Then came Anne and Alex. As they grew, I grew. Every outdated opinion about him shifted and evolved. I finally grasped the concept of selfless sacrifice, how a parent might have to endure monotony and stillness to fill the fridge or pay for school clothes or buy the more expensive baseball glove. How a parent places themselves second, third, fourth. Dad knew. He sat three decades for us.

I went out to our back patio, decided to clock in for a lazy shift. It was just me, a beat-up stool, a cold Dr. Pepper, and the White Sox game on my old man’s vintage transistor radio. I could almost hear the pounding of that massive hydraulic press in the distance. Dad called it his booming lullaby, a thunder song beneath a metal sky.

© Chris Milam

Chris Milam lives in Hamilton, Ohio. His stories have appeared in Lost Balloon, Jellyfish Review, WhiskeyPaper, Sidereal Magazine, formercactus, Train Lit, Molotov Cocktail, JMWW, and elsewhere. He was nominated for Best Small Fictions 2018. You can find him on Twitter @Blukris.