MOSAIC

Chapter 2: The Creature

I rolled to my side and reached for my phone, squinting tiredly as my unadjusted eyes were assaulted by its powerful bluish glow. I forced myself to peer into the brightness of the screen, straining to focus my blurry vision. It was a few minutes past five in the morning. I'd have to get out of bed soon to go to work. Fueled by only a couple hours of broken sleep, the separation of my body from the warm bed was going to be a painfully unpleasant one. I wish I had more time. Not even to sleep. Just to lay there in the dark.

​Just as always, I was acutely aware of the nameless something that squirmed and twisted itself around uncomfortably in the back of my head, seldom allowing me to attain any form of rest. Always there, nagging at me. Biting. Gnawing. Eating me alive. It weighed hundreds of pounds at times and it only grew darker and heavier with each passing year. I haven't found any manner of coping with its uncomfortable weight, and I don't think I will. Most people probably don't. Sometimes I don't really mind it though. Uncomfortable negativity and strain can be a motherfucker, but it's also a damn good driving force. Some people just need a vicious dog gnashing its teeth at their ankles to be propelled forwards.

​I slowly plowed my body forth from the warm bed and took slow laboured steps out from my room. I didn't try to make myself any breakfast, and I didn't get to packing myself a lunch for work. I just sat down in a kitchen chair in the dark and watched the stove's digital clock with stinging, sleep-deprived eyes. In exactly nine minutes I had to be dressed for work and getting into the car, a feat that I would accomplish with grudging efficiency. A mild grin slid across my face for a brief moment as I pondered the bare-bones state of my morning routine. Some people wake up a full two hours before work and go through an entire elaborate morning routine, complete with a hot shower, breakfast, and a quick workout. As for me, I pretty much just brush my teeth and walk out the fucking door.

​I stooped forwards over my kitchen counter and rubbed my eyes, willing myself to stand up and make an effort to prepare a lunch for later on, but the spur of motivated energy wouldn't come. I just wasn't hungry. I knew I'd be hungry later but I cared very little for the future me. He'd have to muscle his way through another workday without eating. Not having a lunch at work is a trivial problem in the grand scheme of things anyway. I collected my things and left my place six minutes late, with a nonchalant tune to my step but a mild edge to my heartbeat.

​The drive was brief, and it was still dark outside when I arrived at the jobsite, an industrial area defined by long, low buildings and concrete yards strewn with work vehicles and construction material. I could hear the ear-splitting scream of heavy machinery already well underway from multiple areas. I walked past rows of work trucks and stacks of steel pipe, wiggling my fingers into my work gloves as I approached the site's main gate. I winced as a tiny piece of steel shrapnel inside my glove slid across the top of one of my hands, leaving what felt like a razor-thin shallow sliver of a cut, adding to the network of cuts, bruises, and burns that lined my hands.

My gloves were unchanged from yesterday and still saturated with oils, residue, and other small fragments from the previous day's toil. The filth irritated a few tiny unhealed cuts on my hands, cuts which would probably be mildly infected and swollen by the end of the day. I brushed at one of my cheeks with my gloved hands to relieve an itch, but realized my mistake too late, smearing a dark black coat of grime from the glove across my face.

​"Nice," I remarked in a low voice, passing through the wide open garage door and heading straight for a porta-potty. Most of our foremen weren't around at the moment, likely inside somewhere, and neither of the welders had arrived, so I had at least a couple of minutes to kill in the bathroom before I had to link up with the rest of the team.