Chanyeol wakes promptly at seven every morning and stretches his legs over the side of his bed, curling his fingers through his hair to comb it into some semblance of order. He’s at the age where his clothes never really fit him, and the thin cotton fabric stretches across his knobbly knees. The shirt stretches in all the wrong places and the pants are perpetually three inches too short. He’s at the age that, the government says, is old enough to work.
Eggs, Chanyeol thinks, look awfully depressing. The semi-solid yolk stares back at his apprehension in sarcastic, viscous mockery. He stabs it in the yellow center with his fork and the eye bleeds all over his plate.
“Laborers,” a crackly PA SYSTEM booms, shaking the walls, “Please make your way to your assignments.”
Chanyeol stands, ditching the yellow and white painting his gray plate. He takes long strides forward, pulling his sleep shirt over his head and tugging off his pants. Gray cotton is replaced with gray polyester that blends in along with gray walls.
His assignment code is slipped under the door.
“Laborers,” the PA SYSTEM repeats, “Please make your way to your assignments.”
Chanyeol is assigned to station fourteen, which means he’s stamping papers. Stamping papers is a preferred assignment, a white-collar job, even if just for a day. There’s no cauterizing irons and no foot long strips of serrated metal. Nothing too dangerous about a CUBICLE.
The ink is red and has odd fibers holding the paste together. It stains Chanyeol’s fingers when he dips the pads of his fingers into the ceramic tin.
“All laborers must be at their assignment locations.”
Gray walls lead to gray streets and Chanyeol can only hear the sound of air flushing in and out of his lungs as his feet hit the cobblestones. He looks down and watches his shoes as he runs, brown canvas custom made to stretch across his giant feet.
“You’re late Chanyeol!” The old man from the fruit stand calls out to him and he responds with a throaty laugh that rumbles through his chest.
He slides to a stop at the door of building fourteen. It’s the largest building in the city, stretching fourteen, hard, STONE FLOORS into the sky. The building is old, and the base is crumbling, but it’s grand in all its antiquity. It stretches up and up, coming to a rusty copper point past the sky and into the heavens.
The oxidized copper column is the only physical contact his world has that stretches into the other. The old fruit stand man always told Chanyeol it was because that point was magical, the only possible connection between up there and down under.
Chanyeol looks into the sky at the world dangling above his, a mirror reflection, a children’s mobile of grand proportions. People, the above people, walk on CONCRETE PAVED roads between polished glass skyscrapers. They live upside down to him, but right side up to themselves.
Chanyeol takes one last glance at the world above, then pulls open the door to building fourteen.
“You’re late Chanyeol.”
“Only a little.”
“Go to your station.”
“Alright.”
He turns into his white CUBICLE, third down the row on the left. On the desk lies a stack of papers piled high on a pale manila envelope. The little container of red stamping ink is placed next to it, sides parallel to each other.
This office building has twenty-eight floors, but the elevator only goes up fourteen. The stairs are split, a foot of empty space in the flights, splitting the building in half. The copper roof of the office extends up, and up, and up until it’s not up anymore.
