Andrew Careaga
Spindled
We knew exactly what the words do not fold meant. We’d been folding stuff since kindergarten, when we creased construction paper and cut them into paper snowflakes to tape on our classroom walls. My older brother was the master folder of our family. He got into origami, folded thick colored paper into intricate swans of pastel green, yellow, purple, and pink.
And we sort of knew what mutilate meant. Although to this day, my mind envisions not paper torn and ripped but cattle ritualistically slaughtered at night, under a full moon, for some kind of blood sacrifice. All the horrible stuff we talked about at campouts.
But spindle? What was spindle? We had no idea.
Dad was a computer programmer. While other kids’ dads brought home stacks of clean white office paper for them to draw on, ours came home with stacks of manila-colored, rectangular cards with tiny rectangular holes punched through them. Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate, warned the fine print of the cards. Diligently we drew and colored on these narrow canvases, careful not to violate the small-print edict. But I always worried: What if we accidentally committed the act of spindling? What would happen to us? Would police knock on our door? Would we be thrown in jail?
Years later, after dad had been forced into early retirement, his punch-card job rendered obsolete, I learned what spindle meant. It meant to impale something, usually a piece of paper, onto some kind of nail-like object. A skyward-pointing stake through the heart. In the newsroom they called it a spike, and it was the implement used to kill insufficient news stories. If the editor deemed a reporter’s efforts unworthy of that day’s edition, to the spindle it went. Spiked – but not like punch. Not like a touchdown ball in the end zone.
When you pulled your vanishing act, I learned more sharply what it meant to be spindled. The pang and pain of it. And now, like a story unworthy of publication, I droop, foisted there, unable to move on.
Andrew Careaga is a writer from Rolla, Missouri. His latest fiction and creative nonfiction appear or are forthcoming in The Argyle, Bulb Culture Collective, Club Plum, MoonLit Getaway, Painted Pebble Lit Mag, Paragraph Planet, The Periwinkle Pelican, Roi Faineant, Spillwords, Syncopation Literary Magazine, and Witcraft.