4.

As soon as Mano closed the heavy iron front door of the Pie Time Factory behind him, it became apparent that it was not a good day to be so late to work. He considered, for a moment, avoiding it all, running away from the factory, and returning to Inez. If he went back to her, he could hold Zuzu while Inez washed her face. She would need to take a shower, he thought. He was a man now, he thought, someone who could be needed to stand nearby while Inez did the miserable work of preparing The Barber’s dead body for its trip down The Cure. But in the factory, he still felt like a girl.

With his new glasses, The Foreman’s terrible mood became visible. The Foreman was in the tobacco steaming room stretching his arms. He was a large and austere man, with a personality as dark grey as the shirt and tie that his body bulged from. His voice bellowed through the steaming machines, and into the room where Mano was hesitating, an arm halfway through a work shirt. The Foreman’s voice was like a locomotive boring its own tunnel through a mountain. It was too late for Mano to turn back.

“Mano, you’re late!”

“I was...someone died, I left my glasses...” Mano stammered back, knowing before he finished his sentence that he should not have started it.

The Foreman didn’t hear a word of it. His voice echoed in the silence of all the other girls who had just stopped chattering. “Come here.”

Mano walked through the cigarette rolling room, into the tobacco steaming room, past all the machines. About two dozen girls stood up from their tables where they had been rolling cigarettes, and formed a line to watch. It was a perk of this factory work to chain smoke, which all of them were doing, even the youngest of them, who was eight. Mary, the tallest of the bunch, walked down the line lighting the cigarettes of her co-workers that dangled from each of their lips. The Foreman waited in the corner of the room with the giant wooden spoon used to scoop the hot wet tobacco from the steaming machines. There were still bits of tobacco on the tip.

“Now.” The Foreman tapped some of the tobacco from the spoon onto the factory floor.

A giant iron wall separated the rolling room from the brewery, and the girls from the boys. The Foreman’s job was to supervise both rooms, and to keep the girls and boys apart. It was his belief that the wall that separated the girls from the boys was the single most important structure in the factory. The lack of any cross-gender fraternization is what kept things humming. Of course, on this particular morning, The Foreman was nowhere to be found among the copper vats of beer, and the boys could move about without supervision. The boys could sense what was about to happen on the other side of that iron wall, and they knew that The Foreman would not return anytime soon—it was too quiet on the other side. It was the kind of quiet that could only mean The Foreman was preoccupied with teaching one of the girls a lesson. For a few moments they stopped what they were doing—pouring, mixing, heating—to put their ears into the metal funnels that were used to pour large amounts of grain into the vats. They put the funnels against the wall, and listened in. There were only three funnels, so only the three oldest boys got to listen. They made gestures to the other boys to let them know what was going on on the other side, and the other boys just waited for more gestures.

“Pants down,” barked The Foreman. He was loud enough that all of the boys on the other side of the wall could hear without the oldest boys having to tell them anything.

Mano unbuckled his belt, and let his trousers drop to his ankles. His briefs sat loose and grey on his skinny hips. He put his hands on the top of his head already knowing what would come next.

“Hands on top of your head,” The Foreman said with a sigh, as if he was just checking things off from a list before he could get to spanking. Then he raised the spoon.

The Foreman’s first spank was fierce, and delivered with more force than what was routine, as a way of proving to the line of girls that his mood was unprecedented. The girls leaned in to hear the second slap of the spoon on Mano’s ass, and imagined that pain on their own asses. Some of the girls couldn’t help but laugh, but not because anything was funny. Sometimes you just laugh when you don’t know how else to feel, when you haven’t yet learned horror, or how to behave horrified. Some of the girls who already knew horror just cried.

The oldest boys, too, leaned in, funnels to their ears, for the same reasons. They had never been spanked by The Foreman, even when they were younger and smaller. They had no fear of The Foreman, so with the sound of each slap, even though they knew it wasn’t true, they were able to imagine it was Mano who was spanking The Foreman. “Split him in half, Mano,” one boy said to himself.

The boys with funnels weren’t the only ones imagining the spoon in other hands. This particular spanking felt different to Mano. He wasn’t scared of The Foreman anymore, and he didn’t anticipate each sting, or the shame, as he had on other bad days. Instead, he let a tiny rage grow. Inside his own pain, he imagined it being The Foreman’s pain. He imagined splitting The Foreman’s body in two with a thousand blows of the heavy spoon to his spine. Mano was half the size of The Foreman, but in his head at that moment, he was twice as big as him. And the thought made Mano laugh out loud.

The Foreman looked up after the second spank. “Enough laughing!” Then he looked to the line of girls. “Enough crying!” There was shuffling, and then only the echo of the third spank.

Usually there were only five spanks, but after the 12^th, Mano’s bones were sore, and his face was hot with the sting from behind him growing up his back. Still, the smile from his laugh stayed frozen there.

“How many more?” asked Mano brazenly. It was bad form to interrupt the spanking, and Mano knew it.

“Silence!” The Foreman’s 13^th spank was very hard.

Mano’s real rage was growing very deep somewhere in his chest, but not on the outside, where his smile remained.

“How many more? I’d like to count along.”

The 14^th-20^th spanks were the hardest that The Foreman could spank. The pain was so great, Mano’s body felt hot through all of its cells. He could feel that his body was made of pain. And it felt to him like the body of a man. But in his throat, he felt cells made of love. He first thought to tell Pepe about his new cells. And he thought to tell his mother, too. And just knowing that he had the two of them to tell about this made these cells made of love multiply.

The Foreman was out of breath, and he leaned momentarily on the enormous wooden spoon like it was his cane. In that moment of silence, Mano tilted his head all the way back and yelled into the factory’s ceiling. “I’m a man!” The line of girls laughed. Mano knew it was true now that he heard his own voice shout it.

The Foreman stood upright and lifted the spoon as a threat to everyone who continued laughing. Then it was his turn to laugh. “A man?” He leaned all the way over to laugh more. “You’re just a little girl. Look at you.”

Mano looked directly at The Foreman and repeated himself, just for The Foreman this time. “I’m a man now.” He stood up straight, despite the lightning in his legs. His shoulders were small. His legs were bright with pinkness and belonged more to a child than a man or a woman. The Foreman stood in front of him to examine his red and girlish face. He tugged slightly on Mano’s long black hair, while Mano stared at him. “You’re just a little girl, aren’t you?”

Mano thought to spit in his face. He felt a new strength in his bones and behind his eyes. He thought about the kind of strength that his father must have felt, hunting things that didn’t exist. “No,” Mano answered.

The Foreman kneeled down and looked at Mano’s entire body. He felt his waist through his work shirt, and then stared at his underwear. “Drop your panties. Show us.”

Without hesitation, Mano lifted his hands from where they were folded on the top of his head, and pulled his briefs all the way down to his ankles. He was a man now. He knew it. Now everyone else knew it, too. He stood back up and looked at all the girls in their eyes. With his new glasses, he could see all their perfectly round pupils shrink into tiny black dots.

Mano felt unfurled, free.

The Foreman felt furious. He felt fooled. He spanked Mano more wildly than ever before.

The girls were squeezing each other’s hands, poking each other in the ribs, as if to remind each other not to forget any of this, to record everything with their eyes so they could discuss it forever. They stared at Mano’s bare genitals as the spanks were being wildly delivered. For the girls, they were the only genitals that most of them had ever really known in person. Mano’s dick flapped there in the cold wet factory air like a shining flag of non-surrender.

The Foreman was beyond winded, and took a knee to catch his breath.

Enid Pine had seen enough. Even though Mano was a year older, she had always felt protective of him. She defended him when the other girls made fun of him, and until now she was the only girl who had ever suspected that Mano wasn’t one of them, wasn’t a girl. At grave risk of being punished herself, she walked over to Mano and picked up his glasses. She checked to see if they were broken, which they were not. She put the glasses back onto Mano’s face.

“Thanks,” he said with a smirk, as if what had just happened to him was routine. Because of the pain, Mano wasn’t capable of bending all the way over to pull up his own briefs, or trousers. “Would you...”

“Yeah.”

She bent down on her knee in front of him and pulled up his trousers around his calves, which were wet with blood and sweat, and around his thighs, which were even wetter. She tied his shoes, too.

The girls could not contain their excitement. Their line was becoming more of a circle. After Enid tied Mano’s shoes, she returned to the circle, and the circle quickly swallowed her back up again, and spit Mano out.