CONTENT WARNING: Horror, claustrophobia
The day the first brick appeared, I was at work, typing vendor data into an Excel sheet. I was twenty-two years old and things were still mostly alright, I thought. I’d quit the stress eating, moved past the unbearable weight of my inferiority, my life, the heavy expectations I placed on myself — my psychiatrist had helped me realise these stressors were self-perpetuating. My boss, Jared, was a really nice guy — laid back, gave me time off whenever I wanted it. I liked him. Even now, he texts me occasionally to ask how I’m doing and invites me out for a drink. I’ve stopped responding, though — I wouldn’t even know what to say.
On that first, fateful day, I hit ‘Enter’ and the spreadsheet auto-formatted a number for the tenth time. Ugh! Spreadsheets! I need to eat something.
The brick was one of those things that you don’t notice immediately, like a new eye floater. As I rifled through my snack drawer, looking for a granola bar to quell my irritation, something on the floor caught my eye.
I closed the drawer and looked at it. What…? I rubbed my eyes, opened them again. It was still there: just a brick, nothing special — it was that reddish color like the ones my grandma’s house is made of. I reached to grab it and my fingers gripped its sharp edges, but I couldn’t pry it off the ground.
“The fuck?” I said, tapping my foot tentatively against the brick.
Kendra, at her desk in the next cubicle, was peering into a hand mirror and reapplying her mascara. She grunted something unintelligible. She was my best friend at work, the only one who had sent me a card when I had a meltdown last year and spent three days in the crisis ward.
“Where did this come from?” I asked her.
“Huh?”
“There’s a… a brick here.”
I scooted my chair away from the desk, trying to get a better angle. Maybe if I stand I can get more leverage to pick it up. But as my chair rolled backwards, my stomach lurched. The brick moved with me, sliding silently across the floor and remaining fixed slightly to my left and a couple feet away.
“Kendra?” My voice shook. “Come here for a minute.”
She rose from behind the partition, heaving a sigh, her chair wheels squealing. When she walked around her desk and stopped in front of me, her foot was inches from the brick. She looked at me, a hand on her hip and one eyebrow raised.
“Doll, your face is white as my ass in December. You okay?”
“It’s…” I pointed at the brick. “I can’t… it’s stuck there.”
“What is, doll?”
“That brick.” What does she mean? It’s right there!
Kendra looked at where I pointed, looked back at me, her brow furrowing. “The floor’s carpet, doll.”
Why is she messing with me?! “Kendra! The brick! On the floor! Right there by your foot!”
Kendra looked down — right at the brick.
“I don’t… Are you…? Should I get some help?” Her eyes softened and her voice did that thing people do when they’re trying to soothe a fussing child.
“Ugh! Here!” I reached to grab her wrist and pulled her hand to the brick, but where it should have made contact, it just… disappeared. Inside the brick. My hand slammed into it, its coarse surface scratching my palm.
I recoiled with a sharp exhale and rolled backwards again. Again, the brick moved with me, staying the same distance from me, in the same position.
“The fuck?!” I shouted. What is happening?!
“Kat, what’s…?”
I leapt from my chair and stepped back several steps, my butt slamming into another desk behind me. The brick followed. I slid along the edge of the desk, exiting the cubicle sideways. The brick stayed with me — solid, silent, spooky as hell. I started to cry.
As I stared at the brick, dread filled my chest and I struggled to breathe. It represented all the things I thought I had overcome — the things I’d been told were all in my head, made up by my own brain.
Jared poked his head out of his office. “Everything okay?”
“I… The… Excuse me!” I stumbled out of my cube and ran for the bathroom, slamming the door shut behind me and snapping the lock closed — surely it can’t follow me in here! My reflection in the large mirror on the back of the door showed my eyes wide and white, my hair half fallen out of its banana clip. My heart was beating too fast and my legs were shaking. I felt like I might fall over.
Oh heck, I need to pee! As I turned away from the door and stepped towards the toilet, I froze. The brick was inside the bathroom. My bladder cramped and I got my pants off as fast as I could, relief flooding through me when I sat down and released the flow, even as my brain was screaming at me to Run!
I never took my eyes off it as I urinated, expecting it to strike at any moment, like a predator in stealth mode. I stared so hard my eyes started burning. I stood up, flushed without turning my head. I went to the sink and washed my hands — and watched as it moved with me, never deviating from its position.
As I walked back to my desk, I watched the brick sliding over the blue rayon carpet. I passed someone in the corridor carrying a stack of papers, their foot on a direct collision course with the brick. I half-opened my mouth to warn them and cringed as their foot collided with it, expecting them and their papers to go flying.
Instead, their foot flickered and vanished for an instant, passing through the brick without even a hitch in their step. Huh?!
Suddenly, the noise in the office was very loud. The lights buzzed. Everything felt kind of blurry at the edges — a grey mist creeping over my vision. I reached my desk and groped for my chair, sitting down hard and gripping the armrests so tightly my knuckles turned white.
“Kat? Is everything okay?” The calm, measured voice emerged from the maelstrom. Jared. I looked up and shook my head slightly to clear my vision. He and Kendra stood at the entrance to my cube, looking at me like I was a bomb about to explode.
“I, uh…” I glanced down at the brick. No. Nothing about this is okay. I rolled my chair forward and the brick travelled with me, clipping through a trash can and reappearing on the other side like a poorly rendered video game object. It was too much for me. Get out! Get out! Can’t breathe!
“My… my aunt died,” I sputtered — the first excuse I thought of. “I need to go.”
I sat at home for two days, and the brick sat with me. Always on my left. Always two feet away.
#
Human brains can get used to pretty much anything, and once I got over the initial shock, I began thinking of it as nothing more than an interesting anomaly. After all, Aunt Nicki swore up and down she could see a man behind her in the guest bathroom mirror; a man who wasn’t there when she turned around. It scared the shit out of her the first time, but she said he never did anything, just stood there.
“Our brains are really just computers,” she would always say — the story was her go-to at family gatherings. “Sometimes they short-circuit.”
I figured that if someone as put-together as Aunt Nicki can see shit like that, I was fine. Apparently, my brain short-circuited and created an imaginary brick companion. I could accept that.
It definitely was not related to my meltdown the year before! Like, sure, I get stressed sometimes to the point of breaking, but nothing is actually wrong with me. I come from a decent family, was never abused, never experienced any real trauma. Nothing was wrong enough to make me truly delusional. This was just a blip, a brain glitch, a harmless man behind me in the mirror.
That line of thinking worked for six months. Then the second brick appeared.
#
It was at my twenty-third birthday dinner. My second margarita had sent me weaving for the bathroom, and I saw a new brick on the floor, moving perfectly in time with my unsteady steps. I stumbled to a stop and looked back at my family digging into their enchilada platters and beef burritos, but of course nobody else had noticed it.
“Kat?” my mom mumbled through a mouthful of rice. “You good?”
I knew she thought I was sloshed — two empty oversized margarita glasses sat in front of my half-eaten plate, only a bit of ice left melting at the bottom.
“Yeah, yeah. Just… gotta pee,” I stammered, and beelined for the ladies’.
I sat on the toilet and stared at the new brick, the moment mirrored from six months before. This time, Mariachi music played through speakers above the door and the smell of fresh tortillas mingled with the lavender bathroom perfume.
The new brick was about a foot to the right of the first brick — same color, same size. I could reach out and feel its rough surface, but I could not pick it up. It moved with me, always holding its position and distance.
By the time I returned to the table, I had my breathing under control, but I was shaking and lightheaded through the rest of the meal. My sisters teased me about overdoing it on the margaritas. For once, I didn’t defend myself. I laughed with them. I ate the rest of my food. I watched the bricks from the corner of my eye, and said nothing. I’d rather they think I was a raging alcoholic than insane.
The real panic began when the third brick appeared while I was grocery shopping three months later. Then the fourth and fifth only two days after that. In six months, I was up to twenty-five. They seemed to appear faster the more I thought about them, like a horror movie where just thinking about the ghost will bring it to you. I finally understood the depths of the horror that awaited me: the bricks would keep coming, in higher numbers every time, and I didn’t know if they would stop before they walled me in.
#
I tried everything. I bought a plane ticket to Europe when I turned twenty-five, thinking maybe they couldn’t follow me into the air, couldn’t travel across that much water. The flight attendant’s polished black pumps just flickered through the wall of bricks as if they were a mirage.
I’ve tried smashing the bricks with hammers and picks. Every tool passed straight through them — the first time I tried landed me in the hospital with a busted kneecap, the momentum of my strike carrying the hammer straight through the brick and into me.
I bought a solvent that said it would dissolve mortar. It slopped off the head of the applicator and spilled through the bricks, pooling on the floor and permanently staining my living room carpet.
Nothing could touch the bricks, but they weren’t intangible. Not, at least, for me.
#
I got weird looks at checkout counters when I insisted on standing at a certain angle relative to the employee helping me, so I started telling people I was losing my sight. How else could I explain that I could only see things if they were in a very particular spot on my right? It wasn’t a lie. Not really. The bricks had blocked about two-thirds of my field of vision.
I tried for a long time to keep working. I couldn’t drive anymore — I took Ubers, carpooled, even begged my sisters for rides. In the end, my unraveling mental state pulled the plug for me.
Jared was so patient, so understanding. After I had failed to escape the bricks via plane, I sat down on the filthy airport floor and called his cell, sobbing uncontrollably. I hadn’t really been thinking, just pressed ‘call’ on the first name I saw in my recents. I was awfully embarrassed after, but he assured me that he was here for me, even just as a listening ear. I don’t know how I got so lucky. If I’d worked anywhere else, I would’ve been called in by HR the next day, I know it.
Part of me thinks there could have been something between us, if I hadn’t been so preoccupied with the bricks. He was unmarried, as far as I knew — never wore a ring, anyway. I liked the way he dressed and his soft smile. I have no idea if he ever thought of me that way, but I never asked. There had been that one time, when I went to deliver some reports, and he’d caught my hand gently, making me gasp.
“Your hands!” he said. “What happened?”
I didn’t know how to explain that the scrapes and scars were from accidentally smashing my hands on the bricks, so I shrugged it off with some half-assed story about a home DIY project.
That was a year ago.
#
Kendra was gone — giving birth to her third kid had finally convinced her to stay home with them. At her going away party, I’d smashed my knuckles on the bricks again, trying to catch a lighter someone tossed at me to light the candles on her cake. Old reactions die hard, I guess.
My new cube-mate, Dom, was a nice enough guy, but a crappy worker. I had to pick up a lot of slack after we lost Kendra. I don’t think it contributed to my breakdown — the bricks were more than enough to do that — but I bet Jared still thinks it did. I never told him the real reason I left.
I was broke, living paycheck-to-paycheck — transportation costs ate up most of my salary and the cash I got when I sold my car only lasted a few months. I knew I had my family to drive me if I really needed it, but I couldn’t bother them for little things. I couldn’t bring myself to beg them for rides except in emergencies, like when my aunt actually did die and we all had to drive up to Springfield for the funeral.
My last day at work started going downhill when Dom asked me to grab a box of manila folders from the supply shelf. I angled myself so I could reach through my opening. As I lifted onto my toes and thrust my hand toward the gap in the bricks, aiming for the folder box, a new brick appeared right at the moment my hand reached the opening.
My hand smashed into the brick and one of my fingernails bent back. It hurt like ever-loving sin, and I lost it.
“Fuck! Fucking fuck!” I shouted, clutching my throbbing hand to my chest. Tears stung my eyes. This is so unfair! Why do I have to live like this?!
“Kat?” Jared emerged from the employee kitchen with a steaming plate. It smelled like Mexican food.
“Fuck, this hurts!” I said through gritted teeth. My nail throbbed and burned, the pain building. The seconds ticked past. I could see blood welling along the sides of the nail. “Fucking bricks! Fuck this!”
Tears streamed down my face and I did nothing to try and stop them. I no longer cared what anyone thought of me. I was done. That fucking brick! Showing up right in that fucking moment! It just made me so. Fucking. Mad! I let out a shriek and, in a mad burst of energy, directed all my weight and fury into the supply shelf. The flimsy metal shelf crashed to the floor, boxes of paper and thumbtacks and sticky notes tumbling off it like rocks in an avalanche. The office chatter went silent — my colleagues turned as one to stare.
“Kat!” Jared shouted. I couldn’t see him. My heartbeat sounded in my ears and my breath came fast and shallow. The pain in my finger wasn’t easing. I felt more trapped by the bricks than ever before. I opened my mouth to scream again, not sure if I’d be able to stop this time.
And then, Jared was bursting through the bricks on my left, flickering through them like they were nothing. He reached out to touch my arm, his grip cool and firm. He looked at me with his eyes wide, the pupils dilated with fear and uncertainty. “Kat? Can we calm down here? What’s the problem?”
And that was it. I was done. Seeing Jared look at me like that — like I was dangerous, unstable — was what broke me. Because I knew that I was becoming unstable.
I jerked my arm from his grip. I was crying, gasping great, heaving sobs: “I’m sorry! I tried. I tried! I can’t anymore. I’m sorry.”
I ran through the office and out the front door. I imagined the shocked faces of Dom, of Jared, of all my coworkers as they watched me flee. I could almost hear them gossiping about my dramatic departure in the breakroom later.
Things got much worse after that.
#
I spent twenty dollars on an Uber home and cried in the backseat for the whole ride. The driver eyed me in the rearview mirror and handed me a box of Kleenex he had on the passenger seat, then turned up the radio and left me alone. I guess they get used to that kind of thing.
I had no savings and about three hundred dollars in my checking account. I lay on the couch for a week, then two. I ate the forgotten food in my kitchen — a can of lima beans, three cans of sweet corn, pasta sauce, canned tuna, yogurt a month past expiration, hot dogs from a long-opened package. When I got down to two tiny cans of mushrooms and a jar of strawberry jelly, I realized I needed to figure out what to do.
How about just dying? No. I couldn’t kill myself. I was too afraid of the pain. And anyway, I didn’t want to. I wanted to figure out how to live.
I couldn’t work anymore. Every time I thought about it, I felt my fingernail burst with pain, saw Jared look at me like a rabid animal…
I needed someone to take care of me. Without a job, moving back in with my parents wasn’t an option. They had made that clear the day I turned sixteen — no freeloaders! And it’s not like I could just rock up and tell them: “Hey, so I’m living inside this increasingly closed in room that is probably gonna kill me one day but you can’t see it and you can’t feel it but you just gotta believe me, ok? I’m not crazy — or maybe I am but it’s not my fault. So, hey, can I come crash in my old bedroom till I die?”
A care facility would be nice, I thought — have my meals brought to me, my room cleaned, bedsheets washed — no need to worry about driving places or going shopping. But a care facility cost money, and I knew my parents would never agree to put me up in one. They hated to spend money…
Unless… maybe there is a way…
I realized I needed to do something serious, something dangerous, so my parents would be forced to put me somewhere to keep me safe. To keep others safe from me.
#
The wound on my arm healed quickly, and I felt a little bad for scaring my family, but not bad enough to change my plan. The medical staff in the hospital crisis wing were kind, quickly becoming unwitting supporters of my deception.
I complained of hallucinations and voices that told me to hurt myself and others. I described missing time, pounding headaches, and confusion. The usual stuff. I needed to be sure I was seen as a problem, that I needed to be secreted away where no one would have to deal with me. I needed to be sure they wouldn’t just try and medicate it all away. I needed to be safe while I waited. I needed someone to take care of me for a long, long time.
It wasn’t really a lie. The bricks are a particularly persistent — and solid — hallucination.
#
I’ve stopped counting the bricks now. There are too many; I lose count when I try. My bed is positioned so that the door to my room is in my sight hole when I lay down.
My voice sounds weird when I speak. It reverberates, bouncing off the bricks, as if I were speaking into the side of a house. The bricks eliminate most outside sound and beyond the boundaries of my room, I can’t hear much. The orderlies talk to me through the ever-shrinking hole, always accommodating my ‘delusions’; it’s the only thing that sounds normal anymore.
I’ve made a friend, somehow. Danica and I watch The Voice every Tuesday. She doesn’t think it’s strange that I sit with my body twisted in the chair just right so I can see the TV screen. I told Danica about the bricks when I’d been here for three months. She listened quietly from somewhere behind the wall where I couldn’t see her, and when I was finished, she told me about the gnomes that stole cash from her mother’s wallet when she was a kid, something she was always blamed for.
Why do I not believe her? It’s not like my story is any less unbelievable, but for some reason hers feels… I don’t know… really unbelievable.
I feel like a hypocrite.
#
The bricks are going to kill me.
This morning, I woke up to a new brick resting above me, in the air, touching the topmost brick at the corner.
A ceiling! They’re starting a ceiling! They’re walling me into a box! Waves of nausea pulse through my body. Deferring the horror is no longer an option. I know what’s coming. I’m going to be bricked in here. Alive.
#
I don’t feel the breeze from the ceiling fan on my skin anymore. My breathing is thin and labored. With the new brick ceiling closing slowly above me, my air is running out. I finally asked the nurses for an oxygen tank after weeks of suffering in silence. I’d almost forgotten they were here to help me.
The tank would probably get in my way if I had any sort of life anymore. Here, in the silent dark, it’s almost like having a friend. Danica gave me a yellow smiley face sticker, and I put it on my mask. Now people outside can’t see my face any better than I can see theirs.
#
I know the nurses think this is all in my head and I don’t blame them. Danica doesn’t see the bricks either. Jared and Kendra never did. Just me. The scars on my hands are real — Danica can see them. She asked about them. I don’t understand how she can see my scars but not my bricks.
I wish just one other person would say they could see them too. The nurses play along, of course, as it is their job to do. They bring me fresh oxygen tanks, leave the lights on after that horrible night I woke up to pee and couldn’t find the light switch in the dark. But their tolerance of my strange needs does nothing to affirm my torturous reality.
Really, the oxygen and lights and assistance are nice, but I just want to hear someone say they believe me; truly believe, not the way you say you believe someone just to talk them down, when really you think they’re full of shit. The bricks have isolated me from any sort of real comfort. How can I ever be fully seen and understood when my reality is invisible to everyone around me?
I have an awful lot of time to ruminate, these days, between an endless supply of paperbacks and 3D puzzles. The nurses even gave me a little headlamp when I complained of the dark. I’m sure they laugh together about it while they eat their lunch in the breakroom. The truth is, I would give up all these little luxuries — the books, the puzzles, even the Nintendo Switch — just for one of them to look at me and truly understand.
#
There’s one space left. Just enough room for one last brick. I lie curled up in my box and stare at it for hours each day, the light streaming in through my last portal to the outside world. Yes, people can bring me supplies. I will not starve. They can bring my food tray to me, put it in my hands, remove it when I’m done, lead me to the bathroom. They can give me fresh oxygen tanks, hook them up for me.
But I’m not truly breathing. I’ve known this for a long time.
Even with the oxygen, I feel like I’m suffocating. I wonder, when the last brick falls into place, will it cut off the sounds of the room around me? Will I be able to hear people speaking to me, asking what I need, if they’re outside my personal prison?
What if when that last brick falls into place, no one will be able to hear me? What if no one can hear me ask for a fresh tank? For food?
What if no one can hear me cry out?
###
Ava Christina, a lifelong Tri-Cities resident, is a writer of fantasy and horror stories, often blurring the lines between the two. Instagram: @ac_bookaddict Blog: www.penandsword.blog
