I set myself an exercise in descriptive writing
Without any warning the thin wooden door was flung open, flooding our space with the bright searing light of day, and streaming straight onto our eyes, but we couldn’t even blink our work was about to begin.
It was the same every day, it would always start with tension, always shared by and individual to each of us, always it felt as if we were pulled tight, constricting our body, but still able to move.
This was our daily ritual, but it wasn’t uncomfortable or painful, that would might come later.
My work partner would only have a few more moments of peace until they too would begin to experience the same tension and constriction of movement.
We are not, able to speak or move of our own volition by the time we start work.
The tension we both experience isn’t masochistic, but it is always deliberate and measured, by the nimble fingers of another.
We never object or complain, our task is performed in a shared silence, we offer no protest.
Very soon we would be tested, our ability to move within these constraints, and sometimes human lives would depend on our ability to perform our simple task?
By now we are very familiar with our working environment, the smooth surface of my skin is pitted and bruised and bears the permanent scars of the tension we have to endure, deep and permanent across my work hardened skin.
Soon we would be put to the test, feeling the whole body of weight as it bears down, pressing stretching, as if to crush our very sole.
There is no pain, just the inexorable torment of our existence.
What will today bring?
The icy rain, or sun dried dust, a biting wind, maybe the soft warm comfort of the home.
We never object or cry out, we accept our place, and the role we now played within each day.
We had both been bought and paid for many months ago.
Without request, each evening we were washed and fed, if you could call the thin greasy offering food, but it kept us alive, so that as each new day broke we would conform without protest.
How accommodating we are, what good value we are, how it would be almost impossible to replace us.
The moments of evening respite are welcome, our as our bindings are slackened or sometimes removed completely, our burden finally lifted, freeing our soles.
We exchange the light of day for darkness, captive, the doors of our resting place are closed, our eyes not able to see through the inky blackness of our confinement.
Our world is now silent, sleeping, so now we wait.
Soon the morning light will burst into the wardrobe as the doors open and
a new day begins with a pair of size ten feet being laced in to a favourite pair of boots.