NaNoWriMo Freewrite Practice #3 – The Business of Construction

Logan is a young child culturing a talent in construction. It’s not an inherited endeavor, at least as far as he knows; his dad is in the business of investments. And unlike playing the piano, it is not something he told his mom that he wanted to do. He just finds himself developing a special skill at it, without consciously even knowing he’s getting good at it. In fact, he is still not aware of his superpower, but it’s growing inside of him. He even knows what all of the necessary supplies are. He doesn’t accept contract labor; it’s all internal work. An inside job.

Today, Logan starts his first project, unknowingly. His unwitting hands assemble the proper proportion of concrete and water inside of a big tumbling truck that slowly turns to keep it all motile. He keeps a dowel in his back pocket. He does pushups on a regular basis in order to preserve his stamina and ensure his lifting strength. Squats help too. He doesn’t exercise specifically for the purpose of construction, because he doesn’t really know that he’s in that business. Rather, it happens while he’s playing with the other kids in preschool or interacting with his brother and parents back home. Dashes, lunges, pull-ups, all unintentionally serving his cultivation.

It’s a grueling process as Logan tumbles the concrete and prepares it for molding. The Texas sun sits on his shoulders and turns him pink. His arms tire from the constant circular motion, repetitive and interminable, but he continues, unawares. He opens the chute and begins to lay his first foundation. This will be a short wall, just tall enough to prevent a small human from getting in. He has already spent the past few years digging up an encircling moat, preparing for this moment. Because one day it would come. And it has.

The tiny children return to the preschool building after a spat of manicured field-wandering. A few of them, including Logan, stop at a corner of a long hallway, behind some doors. Scott and Stephanie and her twin giggle, and a few other girls. Stephanie has a crush on Scott, and the girls dare him to kiss her. Logan looks on as a specter. And they kiss. A simple peck on the lips. Canoodlers. They squirm and flap around, laughing. What a thing. It’s new territory for the whole bunch of children, such a risk. And Logan looks at them.

The area that Logan has dug out for the foundation is not so wide currently, just a couple of feet. He tests the bed of dirt, where he has removed the living grass to make way for the viscous, gray concrete. He picks up a shredded blade of grass that a worm crawls next to. He coerces the worm to crawl onto the grass and then tosses it and the grass a few yards away, outside of the moat. As he lets the concrete seep slowly into place, the construction project before him transitions from a machination into a beginning. As he looks at the girls laughing, he kneels down to ground-level and draws the dowel from his pocket. Its point threatens the solidifying magma at his mercy before him. He turns the dowel slowly, examining the shiny silver while Stephanie leans in slowly. He deliberates and brings the dowel into contact with the rough surface of the lain lava. With a gesture, he flattens it. There must not be any imperfections if this structure is to hold. He looks up and sees Scott render a smile of exhilaration and glee, just before the moment of connection. Logan carefully smoothes the foundation, preparing it for the bricks to come. Stephanie and Scott touch lips. Logan places the first brick. Everyone giggles. He lays another.

Like a fatalistic domino set, the bricks fall into place one after another, leading Logan along. He does not choose their assembly; they assemble themselves by his hand. One by one, the beginning transitions, growing. Soon Logan sits in the shadow of his nascent project. The initial step is not yet complete, but already it protects him from the scorcher in the sky, which is setting. The completed section of the lain bricks casts a long shadow. He stands to admire his work and the pace of its development, but as he looks upon it he realizes that he knows not what he is doing or why. Suddenly confused, he turns. He sees the former moat, now filled in with gray ooze, like a driveway by way of which one could approach him with a tricycle.

Logan walks out of the beleaguering shadow to the foot of a shorter stacked section of bricks. The sun is not so hot as it lowers, and Logan sees his shadow stretched out at odds before him. It is long and sharp, piercing the ground upon which it dances, pointing away from the warm sun. The children scamper back into the classroom to look at the pet butterflies held inside of a plastic cage. They are not much in the way of pets as they simply flit about, trapped within their transparent plastic panels. He becomes sad when he sees the butterflies or thinks of them. They will die, snuffed within oily walls, creatures with the rarest ability of flight restricted to a square foot, beset by another species they don’t comprehend. Logan imagines freeing them, but he fears the repercussions of such a daring move.

And so Logan turns back to the bricks, daydreaming of butterflies and their liberation. Just a dream, never to be realized. In his semi-waking state, in a daze wrought by the burden of perceived impossibility, his hands caress a new brick. It’s fortified, rough, and heavy, like a weight, but strong. And they will be impregnable together. He sets another brick down and continues in his unconscious construction. Other children laugh in the distance. He builds, more and more quickly. In a wanton fury, he stacks as dreams die. One after another. One by one. Mortar, smooth, stack, advance.

In this manner of suspension Logan expends an unmeasured amount of time that he is unaware of, until one day the sun rises, but he does not see it. He lies in the shadow of his construct, completed. He faces away from laughter, behind the bricks. The smell of hardened concrete soaks into his skin. He forgets. He sits, waiting for the future. All around him, for an expanse that drives into eternity, he has forged his premiere construction, and what an achievement it is. Through jaded eyes, sensitive to the sun and now better suited for a slightly darker climate, he observes his accomplishment. Somewhere in the back of his mind, at some fundamental level, he must acknowledge what he has created, but consciously he has no awareness. A kind of smile of sets in, like an incipient infection. It spreads across his face. He has built a wall.