Author: Aubrey Williams

I’ve been looking for work for months now. After the chip company got all-new machinery, the bean-counters did a review, and I was one of the names that got a red strikethrough. I can’t live on redundancy forever, and I’m not poor enough to get a rare welfare payment, so I need to find something in this nest quick before I’m shuffling along the vents and tubes looking for discarded fast-food. Okay, I won’t actually be homeless, but a person worries. Like a robot I’ve been standing in lines at job centres, mechanically sending CVs and letters to all manner of firms, hoping to hear back something. It seems like half of the jobs I see don’t actually want me, but I’m told I have to keep persevering. On my way to and from the main job centre, I pass by an alley that leads to a confluence of other alleys behind the backs of the major buildings here— an all-boys secondary school, a medical supplies warehouse, of course the job centre too, a cheap canteen, and some sort of plumbing firm. There’s a sort-of concrete courtyard of scorched cement and forgotten dumpsters, a few scant weeds here-and-there, and disused loading doors. I’ve noticed that each time I pass by, there’s always a few men standing there. They’re not lounging around, not really, and they don’t seem to be doing all that much. Most of them seem like employed men, or at least they’re either wearing high-visibility jackets, pressure overalls, or suits. As I’ve passed by, I’ve realised it’s always the same men, or at least none of the men I’ve seen ever seem to vanish. New ones join occasionally, and end up also standing around. I think there’s about ten.

Weird, right?

My curiosity wouldn’t go away, so after another week of failing to get even a modicum of acknowledgement, I decided to pop into one of those alleys and observe the group. I saw six of the regulars there, some with their hands in their pockets, slightly bobbing around as fellas do when they’re waiting around, one man leaning on a pillar, the rest stood tall and straight. As I watched them, a tall man with a good head of hair and a suit from ten years ago brushed by, and he turned, curious. He looked me up and down before smiling, and asked:

“You want to join us? Not got anything much either, right?”

I nodded, and he motioned for me to follow. This man in the old suit walked over past some ragwort poking-out of a crack and settled on a spot next to a rusted bolt about the size of my wrist. He didn’t say anything or motion anything to the other men. I hesitated for a few seconds, but I followed, wanly smiling at the others before taking a spot next to the man I’d spoken to, with a discarded crate to lean against. In the next ten minutes, three more men came from different alleys: one looked like he worked in construction; another had on the kind of apron that reminded me of the medical building; and the third had a look that screamed “teacher”. All of the men took up what were clearly the positions they were accustomed to.

Nothing was said, nothing happened. We were there for an hour. In that time, I noticed a regularity to all the men’s movements, a repeating of patterns. I also realised that none of them ever exhaled or inhaled.

Come to think of it, I didn’t breathe either. I couldn’t, and didn’t know how.