Digital Ink'd

  I wish I could tell you how J and I got inside. But truth be told, the memory’s gone fuzzy, like an old film reel playing just a little out of sync. What I do remember is this: the stale scent of time, the eerie silence of abandonment, and the feeling that we’d stepped through a tear in the fabric of the present. It had been years since I last set foot in Massachusetts. These days, it’s rare you’ll find me wandering anywhere in the upper Northeast. Life has a funny way of circling back, though. Once upon a time, I called this place home, three years in total, though you wouldn’t know it from how little I explored. The first year, I was carless, and Massachusetts isn’t the kind of state that makes it easy to explore on foot, especially if you’re not in Boston. By the time I bought a car and started to find my rhythm behind the wheel, the clock was already ticking down on my final months there. Funny, the timing of it all. That was 2012, the same year I should have bought some Bitc...

The chain-link fence groaned under our weight as we slipped through, pressing close to the weather-beaten brick of the former Winchester Repeating Arms factory. Above us, the ladder’s rusted rungs protested with each step, but hesitation wasn’t an option. Discovery meant confrontation, and the sprawling parking lot just beyond the fence was a minefield of potential witnesses. One stray glance from a passing driver, and the game would be over. By the time we reached the landing, the adrenaline had sharpened into focus. Cameras in hand, J and I moved deeper into the carcass of the building, where the echoes of machinery and workers had long since faded. What remained was a skeleton: hollowed-out floors, walls stripped of identity, and an almost performative emptiness. No brass casings, no faded blueprints, no ghosts of assembly lines, just the quiet resentment of a place forgotten. The July heat outside was oppressive, but inside, it pooled like a fever. Humidity clung to every surface, ...

  It was one of those quintessential New England summer days, sun-warmed, humming with the low thrum of cicadas, when we found ourselves once again at the edges of the InterRoyal site in Plainfield, Connecticut. The old factory loomed like a fossil of America’s industrial past: gutted, crumbling, but somehow still proud. We ducked beneath a tangle of undergrowth, clothes catching on brambles, and slid our sweaty frames through a yawning tear in the chain-link fence. This wasn’t our first time. A previous visit had led us down a forgotten spur of railroad track, the kind that once ferried goods and ambition in and out of this small mill town. We had wandered to the far edge of the property, then, into what remained of the site’s crown jewel, an enormous building gutted by fire, its charred skeleton exposed to the sky. Inside, two hulking Lake Erie Engineering Corporation punch presses still stood like monuments. Imposing, unmoved, rooted deep in the floorboards that had outlasted ge...