Victoria Bassett-Wilton

Every movement was an effort.  He didn’t want to work anymore.  He didn’t want to work in any field, or do anything.  This life was fucking awful.  This monster loomed over him like a god grinning upon its breakfast, and he hated it.  He hated it.  With every fibre of his being, with every cell of his soul, he hated it.  He didn’t want to pay to live anymore.  What kind of ridiculous assertion was that.  Shelter, food, water…these were basic human needs.  Right at the very bottom of the pyramid.  The bottom of it! And he was having to work to get it? That was so stupid.  It was utterly stupid. 

He started laughing at the ridiculousness of it, at the shame of it.  Society should be shamed, he decided promptly.  Humanity should be ashamed.  He wouldn’t be.  He should be sculpting, just creating and shaping for days and days and days and days and forever and ever.  But he couldn’t.  He could not.  He wanted to.  Oh, he so desperately wanted to.  It was an itch, a burn, a growth in him that could not be stopped by any means, and he felt it slowly turning its head to look at him every day that he ignored it. 

Every day he pushed it aside he could feel his talent – his great love – begin to become infected, and slowly, slowly, become an agent of his undoing.  He could not let that happen.  Absolutely not. 

But he did need to live, and he did need to make money to live, and he wasn’t a well-known sculptor yet.  He would be.  But he wasn’t yet, and so he wasn’t making enough money to live off his creations yet. And therefore he needed to work at this awful, awful job that hadn’t started out so awful but was now sucking him dry for all he was worth. 

Then the fear came, the fear that always came after this realisation manifested itself as words in his mind: What if he couldn’t escape? What if he was going to work for this monstrous monstrosity for the rest of his days?

He could feel the shackles tightening, and he was desperately looking for the key, but it was so hard.  It was so, so, so, hard, and the fight was being sapped from him.  But he had to fight.  He had to. 

He looked around, and saw all those around him with their heads buried in the sand like they were great worms, and he saw so clearly that like those worms – those great and terrific worms – had talent, had vision, had art and stories begging to be born. 

And he saw they had squashed it, all of them with their heads staring at computer screens, completing menial tasks that brought them no satisfaction, had ignored their calling and let it fester and turn on them.  They were drowning under its angry press, and now they were just tiny, tiny little worms that writhed under the desert dirt and never dared to surface.

It was horrible.  More than horrible, it was soul-crushing, spirit-killing work.  It wasn’t even the actual work that was the problem.  That shit was easy.  That shit? Man, he could do that in his sleep.  It was more than that.  More than the personalities around him, who were quick to anger and quick to laugh, their duality was duplicitous, he had decided. 

Sometimes, on his way to work, he fantasised about jumping off the train tracks, crossing that yellow line and letting a big, fat, yellow train hit him as he went.  Or, alternatively, that a bus would hit him.  He didn’t want to be dead or anything, he just wanted to be injured enough that he wouldn’t have to go to work for a while.  Maybe ever.  And every day he looked forward to the night, and every night he dreaded the oncoming day, which was hurtling towards him with near certainty.  Sometimes, he actually cried in the mornings. 

Would there be an end to this? How could he make it end? That was the question, and its answer was elusive, a phantom of the night.  He would lie awake in his bed, not daring to look at the time, because he knew if he did sleep would desert him entirely.

If he saw the time, his mind would instantly start counting down the minutes until he’d have to start getting ready for work.  His passion had deserted him, and he felt helpless without it.  He’d tried planning a sculpture earlier, and his fingers had held the pencil pathetically, frozen and lacking all command.  He’d boasted of his creativity earlier, but now it seemed that he had none left.  The monsters in the office had sucked it from him, slurped it up and devoured it.  He had none left to spare, not a millilitre for himself.

“James, what are you doing this weekend?”

He swung around in his chair, pulled from his thoughts.  He laughed.  “I’m going to rot.  That’s all I wanna do mate, just bed-rot.  Lie in my bed and do nothing.”