The Minotaur Takes His Own Sweet Time by Steven Sherrill

daytime can suffocate. It is sometimes easier to breathe, to wait, at night. The Minotaur envies the plaster trout, finally at home at the bottom of the murky pond. At night the Minotaur knows where to go. It is day. The Minotaur decides to go there anyway.
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    Joy Furnace. It says so on the information kiosk. It doesn’t matter to the Minotaur that there are hundreds of other abandoned limestone kilns in the state, each with its own red dot on the plastic map; Joy Furnace is the one he stumbled into those few years ago. It doesn’t matter that the furnaces fired all day and all night, cooking quarried limestone down to its powdery essence. Dozens of men huffed the toxic air all day, all night—mules, too, and horses.
    Joy Furnace. Gone are the eight-story-high exhaust stacks, the steel cylinders lining the core of each furnace. Nothing is left of the narrow-gauge railroad track that ran along the skinny space carved out of the hillside overhead, where the hopper cars fed chunks of limestone into the fires. Nothing left. There may be some mule bones buried in the grass.
    It’s not important to the Minotaur why he left the highway that day years ago. No official vine-covered Historic Site sign jutted up from the ditch. The rutted dirt road that led into the woods was blocked by a thick and sagging chain, from which hung the cautionary No Trespassing, PA Department of Conservation and Natural Resources.
    The Minotaur is nomadic by default. An intuitive vagabond. He may have been drawn, he may have been compelled, or he may have simply stepped over the chain and wandered up the dirt path for no good reason at all. Nevertheless he did walk off the road, step over the chain, and wander up the dirt path to the remains of Joy Furnace—the stacked-stone foundations of five massive kilns in a row, perfectly aligned, each base twenty-plus feet wide, twenty-plus feet deep, each wall rising two full stories, the front and rear walls pierced by arched portals high enough, wide enough, for even a Minotaur to come and go with ease. It took the Minotaur’s breath. The tomblike beauty of the structures, each capped by crumbling brickwork, looking parapet-like from below. Or maybe they are plinths waiting patiently in the woods for whatever they’re meant to bear. Abandoned. All abandoned now. They took his breath.
    The Minotaur stumbled on, those years ago, past the sole information placard mounted on waist-high posts in the grass. He did not see the faded photograph of the scale model of what Joy Furnace probably looked like in the industry’s heyday. Didn’t read the paragraph about Henceforth Joy, the namesake of the village that grew (just down the river) around the success of the business. Henceforth Joy did not survive the voyage across the ocean; her father never recovered from her death. But Joy Furnace thrived for decades, then in its ruined glory drew buffs and hobbyists for another ten years. The town itself struggles. The Minotaur missed, too, that last paragraph, the one staking the claims: “Lime is a key ingredient in other industries that touch our lives—making steel, paper, and glass, refining sugar, and tanning leather.” Though most of this text was obscured by a Sharpie drawing of an overly endowed stick figure and its own claim: “Tommi has the biggest dick of all.”
    The Minotaur ignored it all and walked right through the arched doorway of the center kiln. Walked onto the cooling floor, where the quicklime was spread before being shoveled into wheelbarrows. The Minotaur looked around. What architectural black magic was this? The kiln’s foundation, from the outside, was square. Exactingly square. But inside, eight uniform walls surrounded the Minotaur. The octagon. The geometric dance between circle and square. The give-and-take between heaven and earth. Liminal and everlasting. That day the Minotaur stood in the center of the holy space, his heavy boots crunching on the black pellets of