“Brick City, Stick City, Straw City” by Nika Murphy

Sometimes, when Boyd squints hard enough, when windows in Brick City line up just right, when sunlight glints off shards of twisted iron fire escapes and bounces between rain-slicked alleys, he sees her. 

She’s not there, though. She’s never there. 

Brick City clicks. Grinds. Boyd steps away from the window and stands in the center of his safety square. He waits for windows and doors and walls to rotate and fold and slide away. He waits for algorithms to rearrange his apartment for optimal productivity and minimal resistance. The window now opens to brick facade. Green wallpaper banana peels off the wall. His door opens to a personal staircase leading down, down, down.

Not up. Never up.

He stands at the bottom of the staircase and waits for the wall to turn into a door. The bathroom remains communal. The previous user forgot to flush. A turd sticks to the toilet bowl, kaleidescoped on a palette of autumnal stains. Spittle spatter decorates the sink.

Boyd brushes his teeth. Someone has drawn a map on the mirror. The Pepto pink path of children’s toothpaste supposedly leading to the roof. 

“What if we never meet again?” he’d said that night. Sat back to back on a windowsill, the pair dangled their feet in the ten inch space between the buildings. 

“We will,” said the girl in the red hoodie.

“Where?” said Boyd.

“The roof. I’ll tie a red balloon so you know how to find me,” Red said. Shoulders as headrests, eyes to the sky. Boyd thought he could make out a shooting star. He never even got her name. 

Six months since the unsanctioned party where they’d met and he still hadn’t found a way up to the roof. Now this. Boyd traces lines and symbols. He ignores chipped black nail polish, blurred reflection, focuses not on dark half moon eyelids, not on coarse split end curls, not on nose too big, too ugly, too no one. 

Too nothing. 

He focuses on the map. Memorizes the series of ventilation shafts, maintenance corridors, and emergency access ladders. Sixty-eight seconds from point A to point B. Thirty-one seconds from B to C. Seven seconds to the roof before the building shifts and crushes anyone still inside any of those areas.

Someone bangs on the wall. Tells Boyd to hurry the fuck up. 

Back in his apartment, he changes into his uniform and waits for the elevator. A dozen others, dressed in identical navy coveralls, masks, and hair nets face him. He squeezes in. Counts holes where buttons used to be. No one talks. Unauthorized conversations may result in fines, demotion, deportation to Stick City. 

Boyd works his nine hour shift in the cafeteria in silence, rehydrating plant-based proteins, powdered milks, and mashed potatoes. He places them on individual compartmentalized trays, covers them with foil and places them on a conveyor belt along with an apple the size of a golf ball and one tea bag. Tomorrow will be oranges. 

The day he met Red was an orange day. They shared a cup of jungle juice distilled in some communal sink. It tasted of mixed berry cough medicine. Boyd squeezed slices of orange into their cup to cut the flavor. It didn’t help, but Red pretended it did. She sucked on the fermented fruit and then ate the slice, rind and all. When she kissed him later that night, zest still danced on her tongue.

On his lunch break, Boyd eats his alloted apple whole, mixes milk powder into his lukewarm tea and carves the map into his mashed potatoes with a spork. He counts—sixty-eight seconds, thirty-one seconds, seven seconds—as the spork tap-tap-taps through his mashed potato maze. 

“What’s that?” Garrett, authorized coworker and bandmate, asks. Square drummer chin juts out to gesture at Boyd’s tray.

“Nothing,” Boyd says, stirs the mash.

“Coming to practice tonight?” 

Boyd nods, acts as if he didn’t forget, as if his guitar isn’t lying at the foot of his bed, out of tune.

After his shift, he changes into his Pigfather Summer Tour shirt and heads to authorized band practice. 

Garrett’s already in the windowless, exposed brick practice space. Filtered air blows into the room and sends goosebumps up Boyd’s arms. He imagines Red’s breath on his neck, then lips, tongue, teeth. The goosebumps travel down his spine, make his dick hard. 

“Where’s Phoebes and Cici?” Boyd asks after their lead singer and bassist. Garrett shrugs his bear shoulders and continues to set up his drum kit.

Boyd ignores his chub, tries to focus on the notes, the beats, the chords. The air conditioner blows air through the vents, numbs his fingers, sucks carbon dioxide through the return and to the roof. 

“What the fuck, Boyd,” Phoebe snaps and cuts off the song.

“Sorry,” Boyd says.

“You’ve been playing like shit all night.”

“He always plays like shit,” says Cici, wrapping the microphone cord around and around their fingers like so many rings.

“This is my only auth night off this week and I’m here wasting it with you. What’s going on?” Phoebe says.

“Distracted, I guess,” says Boyd. Garrett groans. Cici rolls their eyes. Same way they rolled their eyes when Boyd gave them a blow job after practice once. Boyd used to have a crush on those eyes. He’d dream about them, disembodied from the rest of their body, floating in nothingness, and rolling, always rolling. The dreams stopped after he met Red. 

“Alright, take five,” Phoebe says to the others. Garrett and Cici share a vape on stage. The return vent pulls the vapor through slits like threads through a loom. Up, up. 

Phoebe drags Boyd to the corner.

“Want one?” Sour apple hard candy in her palm. Boyd pockets it.

“Thanks, Phoebes.”

“You wanna tell me what’s up with you today?”

“Remember that girl I told you about?”

“From the party?” Phoebe says, barely above a whisper. Someone in Brick City is always listening. Boyd trusts Phoebe though. She and her brother ran with the Bad Wolf Collective before he got sent off to Stick City for “unauthorized activities.” 

“I think I know a way up. To the roof.”

Phoebe sighs and hugs Boyd. She whispers into his ear. Sour apple words. Sweet and tart and hopeless.

“She’s not worth the risk. Besides, where am I gonna find another guitarist who can put up with those two?”

Boyd doesn’t hug back. “Yeah, yeah. No, you’re right,” he says.

“Quit making out already,” Cici yells.

“Let’s jam, yeah?” Phoebe says and pops a candy into her mouth.

Boyd does as he’s told. He shuts his eyes against the brick pushing in from all sides. He tells himself he’s lucky to have all this. Cici wails into the mic. Garrett flings sweat all over the drums. Phoebe winks at Boyd when they make eye contact. 

The alarm sounds and the music stops and the band stands in their safety squares. Brick City clicks, grinds, scrapes around them, but everything else remains unmovable, unchangeable, indestructible. Boyd refuses to give up. Up, up. 

Tomorrow…the roof.

***

The bathroom mirror’s been cleaned. The toilet hasn’t. No matter. Boyd’s memorized the way up. He’s timed his ascent. Except the algorithm’s changed or else he’s miscounted. Forty-seven seconds is all it takes for the alarm to sound and the shaft to start closing in. He’s too far from the entrance to go back and too far from the exit to escape before the screeching metal walls will fold him into origami. 

Boyd yells for help before he’s crushed, before the walls push the air from his lungs and flatten him. He’s stuck. He’s dreamed this nightmare a thousand times. Trapped in some strange passage in a part of Brick City he’s never seen, squeezed until he wakes, eyes wet, mouth dry. In his dreams, he tries to yell for help and the plea sticks in his throat, sour and thick as old cum. In what he thinks are his final moments, Boyd imagines Red sitting on his face. 

A panel opens below him. Someone pulls him by his feet and he is born into a light filled room. Custodians in white coveralls stand over him. One of them kicks Boyd and he curls into a fetal position. Another custodian kneels on Boyd’s back, a third on his legs, the fourth cuffs his wrists, the fifth blindfolds him.

The following hours blur into moments, eternities in rooms, elevators, hallways, and escalators. Boyd assumes he’s moving down, down away from the roof. The air is warm and damp and coats his skin in sweat like cling wrap. He breathes through his mouth to avoid raw sewage odors but now the scent is in his mouth and on his gums and he gags and begs anyone who might listen to please take him back, please, he’s sorry, just let him go home. 

Unlike Brick City, here, no one is listening.

Gloved hands cut away his clothes. Hose him down. The water pressure is so high Boyd winces as it leaves welts across his ass. He is paraded naked to his barracks where custodians finally remove the cuffs and blindfold. 

“Welcome to Stick City, kid,” someone says and slaps him on the back. Laughter erupts. 

It is nothing like Boyd imagined. Everything is gray: the coveralls folded on the bench beside him, the bench itself, tables, chairs, walls, ceiling, the bars and grime on the skylights and the clouds that peek through. Even the people. Their eyes, their skin, their teeth. 

Suddenly, an intense longing for the red bricks of Brick City overwhelms him. He shuts his eyes and thinks of Red’s hoodie. Of citrus and incense blooming in its folds. He wants nothing more than to see red. Red bricks, red balloons, red hoodies, Red. 

He gets his wish two days later when someone from the barracks shivs him in his left bicep and blood weeps from the wound. He is sent to an infirmary where a custodian cleans and bandages the injury. Boyd’s not sure what’s worse, the treatment or the stabbing. Sanipaper sticks to the back of his thighs. He’s in one of those reverse hospital robes, feet dangling, blood blossoming through gauze. Sweat trickles down his spine and makes him shiver. The custodian leaves. 

At least it’s quiet here. No alarms. No gears grinding and hydraulics hissing. The sound of a thousand Stick City inmates/laborers not crushing his brain into pulp. No promises of violence here. No custodians flashing threats, dicks, grins. 

He wonders if his parents know. Bedtime stories of big bad wolves and nothing to prepare him for the terrors of Stick City. 

Door creaks. A man enters. He wears the gray coveralls of inmates, not the white of custodians. Boyd’s not sure who’s worse.

“Are you here to finish me off?” Boyd asks.

“Shh,” the man says. “Follow me.”

Something familiar in his jaw, nose, mouth. 

“Sean?” Boyd says, remembers Phoebe’s brother. He’s gaunt now, facial hair half gray, eyes sunk deep into his skull.

“Yeah, you’re Boyd, right? Phoebe’s friend? Hurry,” Sean says. 

Boyd follows Sean, holds his wounded arm close to his chest. They keep to the walls, down stairs, more stairs, down, down, until they reach Stick City’s bowels. Boilers and generators and pipes groan and clang and whistle. It stinks of hot metal and sewage. 

“Where are we going?” Boyd asks.

“I heard you got stuck in the vents trying to get to the roof, that true?”

“Yeah, why?” Boyd asks. Sweat snakes down his legs and feels like stray piss.

“You told my sister?”

“Yeah.”

“Shouldn’t have done that.”

“Why?”

“She sold you out.”

Boyd doesn’t understand. He’s been existing outside his body for days, going through motions, breathing, eating, shitting, while his mind wanders the halls of memory and imagination. Now Sean’s asking him to abandon the comforts of dissociation and embrace truth: Someone in Brick City is always snitching.

“I thought she was my friend,” Boyd says, aware of his bare ass, of the pain pulsating in his arm. 

“Phoebe? The only thing she cares about is her own comfort, a bigger apartment, a cushy job away from assembly lines. She gave me up for an extra night off. Here.” He hands Boyd a set of blue coveralls. Boyd changes, grimaces as he pulls the sleeve over the wound.

“Why are you helping me? And where are we going?”

“You’re helping us and you’re going back to Brick City, to the roof.” Sean pushes Boyd toward a narrow, dark hall, slick with condensation, barely wide enough to fit a person walking sideways. “Take this,” Sean says, placing a small electronic device in Boyd’s good palm.  “When you get to the roof, press this button.”

“What happens when I press the button?”

“Revolution, baby,” Sean says and smiles. “Isn’t that why you were going up there?”

Boyd doesn’t care about a revolution, but he reads the hope in Sean’s eyes. How it shines, desperate and solid and absolute. It is as fixed as Stick City’s gray bars. It might bend but never break. Boyd saw it in Red’s eyes that night but could not name it. 

He listens carefully as Sean relays directions to Brick City’s roof. 

Boyd climbs… up, up.

***

Boyd’s not sure how close he is to the roof before he’s caught. Not even close, he hopes. There’s no beatings this time. The custodians don’t even bother to blindfold him. Instead, they inject him with a sedative and he sinks into a whirl of dreams and nightmares. 

He wakes in a field between corn stalks. A harvester nearly chops him to bits as it passes, slicing the stalks and swallowing them whole. Boyd shimmies out of the way as the machine pelts him with shredded straw. A stray corn cob falls out of the trailer and rolls to his feet. He holds it up and yells after the harvester but it doesn’t stop. 

Sun above, farmland in all directions. Boyd remembers the posters in the cafeteria. A smiling man in orange coveralls holding an orange. Someone had graffitied over the “Praise our bountiful orchards” sign in crude black cursive: “Fuck Straw City.” Boyd holds up the corn cob and mimics the smile. 

His smile fades after several miles of wandering past soybeans and wheat and hemp. Voice hoarse from yelling, “Hello?!” Blisters long popped and feet rubbed raw, sun about to set, Boyd sits and cries into his corn cob. He misses the stink of Stick City, the noise of Brick City. He misses his parents, his band practices, even Phoebe. He would never see any of them again. 

He would never see Red again. Never again kiss her shoulder tattoo of a wolf silhouetted in flames. 

“What does it mean?” he’d asked.

“A reminder. To never let your hunger lead you to peril.”

“Sounds ominous.”

“We live in ominous times,” she’d said and smiled. 

Boyd tries to recall the moment, the exact angle of her eyes, the curl of her hair. Everything about her was unauthorized and dangerous and beautiful and Boyd wanted all those things. He wanted them for himself and he got them. Even the beauty. Here at the edge of nowhere, with the sun falling beyond the horizon like a burning red balloon and setting the sky ablaze, Boyd is hungry, empty, full of nothing, and he’ll never be satiated, not until he sees Red again, no matter what it costs him.

So Boyd survives Straw City. Exile suits him. He finds solace in solitude, in silence, in stars so myriad, he can divine infinity, in sun-drowned weeks of endurance, starving, scavenging, searching, sabotaging machines, and then building, building, building, shelter and strength and fire, losing it all to storms and starting again, and in howling at the moon with distant coyotes. 

Inside an abandoned cottage, Boyd finds rotting books, moth-mangled clothes, rusty tools, a family of field mice, and a mirror. He doesn’t recognize the tan, taut, bearded man on the other side. 

“Handsome fella,” he croaks to the mice. They chirp in response and scurry away. 

Boyd follows them to a shed where they nest inside a contraption with torn sails and a propeller. Without a diagram or manual to show him how to fix it, Boyd spends weeks disassembling and cleaning the parts. 

He reads. Philosophy. Fantasy. Poetry. He dreams of dragons, of utopia, of love. Revolution, once a distant and foreign concept, now beckons from silverfish-ravaged pages. He studies mice-shredded textbooks. Physics. Engineering. Astronomy. He memorizes the constellations, the names of red stars. Antares. Betelgeuse. Enif. Suhail. He repeats the words like a mantra. Like a song.

He sings the stars as he reinforces the sails and turns them into wings, reattaches them, replaces the seat and the wheels. After countless days and nights of tinkering, testing, failing, the hang glider finally rumbles to life. 

He packs a bag with fruit jerky, corn fuel, spare parts and tools. He shaves the beard, cuts his hair, bathes. He admires the man in the mirror. No longer bland and blank. He is a force, a torrent.

“Better?” he asks the mice. They don’t object.

A moment of panic and fear grips him upon takeoff, but he fights through it and the machine lifts him into the sky until he is a projectile, locked, loaded, and ready to scorch the earth behind him. He turns towards the columns of black smoke in the distance, catches thermals and glides over a rainbow mosaic of crops. 

Soon, Stick City spills over the landscape like a gray sludge and Brick City looms above him, a twisting, bulging cube of brick and iron rising into the clouds. Boyd cranks the propeller and climbs up, up. But he’s too heavy and must drop the bags with the tools and the fuel and the food. The glider buzzes and flies into the clouds where it eventually runs out of fuel and stalls. 

Visibility is zero. Boyd tilts the wings down and descends in a spiral. He crashes into a wall and tumbles out of the glider. The propeller cracks and plummets to the ground. Boyd manages to catch the wings before wind blows them both off the roof.

The roof.

He’s made it. 

He takes a moment and laughs and catches his breath. But only a moment. The custodians must have seen him fly over. They’re probably already on the way to catch him. There will be no beatings, no incarceration, no exile for him if he’s caught again. Only execution. He wastes no more time, climbs a ladder to the highest tower and tries to peer through the smog for any sign of a red balloon. Time and isolation hasn’t made him delusional. He knows Red’s probably given up on him by now, if she ever cared at all.

Boyd remembers her promise, like a furnace keeping his hope hot and alive. A howl echoes through the fog. He howls back and his voice boomerangs. He howls again. Another howl joins him from some other rooftop. Then another. Then the wind shifts, the fog lifts, and Boyd is stunned to see a red balloon tied to an antenna mere steps from him. He jumps down and unties it. A note is written on it, but the balloon is so deflated, he can’t read it. He blows it back up. 

“Come up and see me sometime,” the note says, but the date is a year old. Skin prickles. Heart thuds. Mind plays tricks. What if the note is for someone else? What if Red didn’t write it? What if it’s a trap? Howls rise all around him, pierce through the fog, stab at Boyd’s sanity. 

Brick City shifts below him. Boyd stands, hangs on to the antenna. Mismatched rooftops pop up, fall down, move, dance. This roof rises up, up. Above the fog. And there, another red balloon. And another. And another. Like a thousand red stars in a sea of gray sky. For each balloon he spots, a new howl crescendos into a wolf chorus. Boyd jumps from rooftop to rooftop collecting balloons, some still full of air, some flat and limp. Each one with a note and a date.

“My, what big… dreams you have.” Six months ago.

“When will you huff and puff and blow my house down?” A week ago.

“Can I tickle the hairs on your chinny chin chin?” Two days ago.

A hatch bursts open before he can read the next note.

A red hood pops up. The figure climbs out, dusts herself off and howls. Boyd, frozen, howls back on reflex.

She turns, knife in hand, close to the wrist like she knows how to use it. 

“It’s you,” Boyd says and lets go of the balloon. It floats up, up. Red’s eyes follow it then settle back on Boyd. 

“You made it,” she says. Boyd wants to run to her, to hug her, kiss her, melt into her and cease to exist except as dew on her skin, but there’s no time. Two custodians emerge from the hatch.

“Run,” Boyd yells, grabs Red’s hand. A device falls out, just like the one Sean gave Boyd in Stick City, and rolls toward the open hatch. Red dives for it. The custodians reach for it. Boyd gets there first. 

“Easy, Boyd,” one of the custodians says.

“Hand it over and we’ll forget all about your past mistakes,” says the second.

“We’ll reinstate you,” says the first.

“Don’t listen to them, Boyd,” says Red. The second custodian snatches the knife out of her hand and holds it against her neck. Her wolf tattoo peeks out of her hood. 

“You can have your old life back,” the first custodian says.

“With extra privileges,” adds the second. The first custodian moves closer. Boyd steps back.

“Careful,” says the first. “Or your friend will pay for your actions. Your parents will pay too.” 

The device grows heavy in his hand. It would be so easy to let go. To do nothing. Be nothing. Be no one. But that was never Boyd. Or else Red wouldn’t have chosen him. 

“They’ll pay even more for my inaction,” says Boyd, and pushes the button.

Red elbows the second custodian, takes back her knife and stabs him. The knife sticks in his shoulder and stains the white uniform red. Boyd kicks the first custodian. Red and Boyd run, climb, jump away. 

Brick City screeches and wails and crunches below them, drowning out the howls. The whole structure rumbles. Great cracks spiderweb across the roofs and down the walls. Custodians multiply from doorways and grates and windows. Boyd spots the glider wings on a nearby rooftop. “There, hurry.”

“Wait,” she says. “Where are we going?”

“Where do you want to go?” 

Red looks up, up. “Where you can see the stars.”

Boyd straps them into the glider. The roof starts to crumble.

“Ready?” Boyd asks. Red howls. 

Boyd pushes the glider off the rooftop just as the last brick falls. They ride a thermal away from Brick City. He glimpses behind him. Brick City settles into the shape of a shallow bowl with a wide courtyard in the middle. People spill out from their apartments, gather, huddle, howl, release balloons. 

He angles the glider toward the sun and they soar. Red pulls down her hood and closes her eyes. Her hair shimmers ruby in the light. She smells of citrus and hope.