This is my death sentence: hauling brick and mortar to these crying, dying masons, mere shades, ragged replicas of men, the thinness of each varying according to seniority. Harry, the guy who looks eight months pregnant with that big whopper belly, yelling with that high voice, they just made him foreman. He never shuts up. Doug, another mason, only talks after Harry talks. All day they stand up on their scaffold, talking, clanging, pounding, yelling, scraping, complaining. Gimme this. I need that. On the double, whiner.

That’s what they call me—Harry leading and Doug following suit—ever since I asked to go to the bathroom or else I’d shit my pants, and I didn’t want to do that. I didn’t think they’d want me to, either.

There ain’t no bathrooms out here, whiny. Go out back and squat, you little girl. Don’t forget to wipe, Harry said. Yeah, don’t forget to wipe, Doug mimicked.

Three weeks now, I’ve been their slave. No thank-you’s. Never a good job. Only more, more, more. My hands are blistered like the plague and I’m losing skin like a fucking leper. Lower vertebrae are ground to dust. Every morning I’m swollen in all the wrong places. My hands cramp shut. Twelve-hour days, ninety degrees, I’m sure this is Hell. Time mutates here. I feel myself fading. These are the longest days anywhere.

We’re here, me and these other men, prisoners in their own right, stretching our skin over these buildings, scattering our ashes, pouring ourselves into our work. Becoming our work. Something more powerful than iron bars keeps these men here. Funny, they think I’m the only prisoner on the job. But they don’t see what I see.

Hey, whiny, they say, I need more bricks. I need. I need. I need. Hurry up, and don’t whine so much. We’ll work the pink out of you yet.

I tell them how I look forward to that. Really, I do. But they laugh as I hand them more bricks, skin cells to build the epidermis of this house.



They ask, Why don’t you just quit already?

I say, Because I love this job so much. They think I need this job, that it’s the only time I get out of my cell. Don’t you miss Bubba? They ask this several times a day. There are days, believe me, when I wish they would fire me, that Big Boss Harry would say, Get the hell out of here, you crazy son of a bitch, go. I wish they’d confine me forever to the solitude, the isolation of my concrete room—a room built out of the lives of men other than me. Please, throw me into a cell with the keys and a door I cannot reach.

But no. They’re not a very smart bunch of fellows. Not at all.

Instead, they scream for mortar. Mud, they call it. Mud, you slug, I need mud. Carrying around the buckets of mud, I take the handles with both hands so I don’t drop any more on the ground. I let the bucket swing between my legs, as though this huge, weighty thing is my dick. They laugh at that, too. But they don’t see what I see.



I do not belong here. Every moment I’m here, my soul begs my skinny body to escape. Get me out of here. My body says, Shut up, or I’ll die and trap your dirty ass in here to rot with me. And my soul says, You already have. Every moment I’m here, a little more of me is lost, scattered to the wind. I’m losing myself a piece at a time—this is death a la carte.

The other slave (or bitch, as he prefers it) says those masons couldn’t do anything if we decided to quit getting their shit for them. But he says a lot of thing that aren’t necessarily true. Like when he assured me that the stones in their mud would be fine, and they could pick them out if they didn’t like it. Later, as I flushed my eye out over the water barrel, I decided this other slave isn’t really here to help anyone. Now I’m beginning to understand what he means when he says he’s only here for the check. Mortar has sand in it, along with salt and other corrosive chemicals that burn when flung into one’s eyeball by an angry mason.

They didn’t notice when I pissed in the mud, or shat in it. Just complained, What the fuck kind of sand are you using in this mud? Like I said, they don’t see what I see.

I started by blowing boogers and shooting mucus into the mortar as it mixed in the machine, while I watched the paddles push through the gray slop like pancake batter. My face against the grate covering the mixer, I would spit and watch part of myself diffuse, become diluted, forever lost.

Through the noise of the mixer engine growling beside my head, I heard a familiar bellowing. I broke off a string of saliva and wiped my mouth on my shoulder as I looked up. There was Doug, waving his arms and yelling at me. His mouth moved, and his crooked, rotting, missing teeth played hide and seek behind chapped worm-section lips. All but a few higher-pitched crumbs were eaten alive by the ravenous noise of the mixer. Finally, the other slave came over and yelled in my ear what that rotting apple of a mouth had blathered. Get your damn nose out of the mixer, don’t stand there watching the paddles go round, they need mud, they’re all out. You’re holding up production, cousin.

I thanked him for interpreting.

Once, I tried helping this other slave, to lighten his burden by emptying the mixer into a wheelbarrow while he pissed on Harry’s tires. Scraping out the extra mortar missed by the paddles, I thrust the trowel between paddle swipes, attempting to pull out every drop I could manage. It was like a game where every last morsel was infinitely more important than all the rest.

The game ended when the other slave showed up, angry and yelling. Keep your fucking hands and feet out of the mixer at all times. If one of those paddles gets hold of you, that’s it. It ain’t gonna stop just because you squeal.

I said, I see, that makes sense. But, for clarity, what would happen if some flailing part of my body got bitten by the jaws of this machine?

He said, It would blend you into whiner pudding.

I said, Oh, that’s interesting.



I’ve been thinking about what he said, the other slave. About if we decide to stop obeying the masons. Why, sure, it’s obvious that these animals with advanced grunting capabilities will never climb down from their scaffolding and serve themselves as long as my fellow slave and I are able and compliant. More and more, I find myself trying to relive that moment when I no longer heard the yelling, commanding, idiotic voices.

This thought captivates me. Maybe the silence of my cell isn’t so bad. In fact, I crave it. Over the past few hours, my soul has grown to need that silence, that solitude, to see the small mounds of its own existence. This three weeks of being out in the world, with what are traditionally called people, once again being their slave, I think it’s been enough. And my soul agrees.



Carrying my big swinging bucket-cock to spastic masons, I think how my saliva, my spit, the very DNA anchoring my soul in place is swirled around in that mortar, how it will soon become—and will forever remain—part of this house. And I don’t know how that makes me feel. Nauseous, mostly.

Where’d that other dumbshit go? Harry asks anyone listening. That refers to, I gather, my fellow slave. No one answers only because Doug didn’t hear him ask the question.



I hump mud and brick to a mason working on the other side of the jobsite. He asks, So you’re out on work release, right?

I nod and say, Yes.

Well, what’d ya do? Armed robbery? Drugs? B and E? Grand theft auto? What?

I shake my head, No.

Stealing from the candy store? Come on, what’d ya do? You can tell me. He smiles, his big chew-stuffed lip sliding down, leaving a trail of black sediment on his teeth like a slug moving over the dirty prison floors.



As we refill the water barrel at the empty warehouse, I question the other slave, bitch or whatever he prefers. Did you ever think about how if a part of you, even the smallest flake of skin or stray hair falls into that mixer and gets dragged through the mortar, that a part of you is in the walls of that building forever?

He shakes his head, No.



Hey, whiner, Doug says to me, where’d your partner in crime run off to?

I shrug and hand out the buckets of mud.

Well son of a bitch, Harry says. Then he asks, Did he come back from the warehouse with you?

Yes, I say and deal the mud.

The slug-toothed mason yells from his place across the site, Hey, if you won’t tell me what you did, then tell them.

Doug parrots, Yeah, tell us. What did you do?

I say, First let me ask you a question.

Go ahead.

What do you love to do? I mean, what is it you free men do that makes life worth living? What am I missing when I sit in my little cell and eat my dinner all alone, never really communicating with another human being, and lay down and stare at the ceiling until I fall asleep?

Harry growls, I love working, now get me some fucking bricks. Shut up and get back to work. Share your feelings on your own time.

So I fetch bricks and run them up, climbing their scaffold like a chimp. With their precious bricks before them in a neat little pile, I announce I’m going home. This confuses them. As I King Kong my way down their scaffold, they ask where I’m going. Home, I say, I just told you.

Harry says, What the hell are you talking about? You don’t have a doctor’s note, now get your ass back over here, we need mud and brick—and where’s that other dumbshit?

I hear the contents of a bucket slop out onto a mason’s board. By this time, I’m to the street, kicking the dust off my boots. They won’t find me by the time they finally figure it out. Doug, I can see his rotten-apple mouth yelling, What the—? Is this a fucking nose in my mud?

I forgot to ask if they like slave pudding.

Eventually, I’ll be found and taken back home to my cell. After only three weeks on work release, what’s lost of me will never be recovered. Fortunately, I don’t think they’ll ever make me leave again. With my temple to the cold concrete floor, I can watch the gliding slugs, and sweep the solitary cells of my very own existence into piles—all the hair, skin flakes, and dried fluids—every last particle of myself accounted for and not scattered to the winds or stretched over buildings. I’ll not be diluted by brick and mortar. I will not be worked out of existence.