On my time working in the Allegheny cannon factory
Back in 2023, I got this lucrative job working at the cannon factory down the street from the old abandoned steel mill (the very same steel mill I had my first kiss in eight years ago). They would pay me to come in every day, no matter the rain, sleet, snow, or hail, nor the birthdays, baseball games, or religious demonstrations, all just to sit in this dirty old cannon for two hours at a time. They were real particular about those hours too. On Sundays it was 7-9 AM, on Mondays 2-4 PM, Tuesdays 3-5 in the glassy-eyed hours of morning, and so on. Say what you will, but the pay was good, and man, the health insurance coverage was unbeatable. I could’ve broken every bone in my body or knocked out every last tooth in some freak accident, and I still wouldn’t have paid a penny.
After so much time spent inside the barrel of a cannon, nowhere else to look but out the shaft, through the hole in the roof, and right out into the sky, the mind starts to play its tricks on you. It was always on those late Tuesday shifts that I could swear I was hearing footsteps creep up to the cannon, and as they did, the faint crackling sound of a fire would get a little louder. I might’ve even sworn I saw the iron inner walls of the cannon take on the faint orange glow of a flame. Nonetheless, I was here to make money. I had developed a psychological dependence on purchasing these clown-themed trading cards from my local weed dispensary, and I needed a way to finance my purchasing them in bulk. It’s all a speculative market; my investments will pay off ten years from now.
And maybe I experienced some kind of neurological rewiring at this point in my life. What of it? It’s not wrong for a man to experience sexual awakening while being paid for his time in a 40-ton metal cylinder.
Sometimes I would doze off during the night shifts and with my thoughts poisoned by thousands of illustrations of dope-smoking clowns, I would dream I was in a circus. My cannon would suddenly be painted a stimulating coat of red, white, and blue. I could see myself from the perspective of a stranger, and I too was painted brilliantly, with red in my cheeks like an orgasmic blush. I could see a sea of clowns surrounding me, caught in a rhythmic dance.
Most times I found myself in the circus, I would jolt awake to some loud factory sound ringing the whole cannon tube, but this one Tuesday night, last year in May, the entire factory was dead silent. Before long, I was back in the circus. As the clowns spun their circles around me and my cannon, I sensed something approaching. All of a sudden I felt a stern pressure on my iron hull, as the most muscular clown of them all had leaned on my cannon. He produced a blunt from thin air, took a long inhale of it, then flicked it onto my fuse. I heard that fire crackle and my muscles tightened for the blast. The clowns kept dancing and dancing and the big one wrapped his arm tight around the perimeter.
I woke up with semen in my pants. My boss, a particularly bulldog-adjacent man, was peering down the barrel with as much of his face as could fit. “We need to have a chat,” he said, his speech half-obstructed by a cigar. I apologized about as much as a half-awake man with semen in his pants could from the inside of a cannon.
“We’re letting you go.”
I thought about a really topical joke I could’ve made, but instead I told him I understood and I walked home in the dark. It wasn’t that funny anyway.