The Cycle

"Why the fuck are we doing this shit?" Jimmy shoots the question sharply to Tom as he is holding a wooden stud in place for the wall they are putting together.

"What do you mean, man? We got hired to do the job."

"Yeah, but this is bullshit. We don't get paid shit. We are fucking killing ourselves to do this job. Our benefits are worse than the pay. Man, fuck this shit."

"Dude. Just do the job. We have to get paid."

Jimmy exhales sharply, rolls his eyes, and the screws the stud in place.

Several minutes pass without any other noises being made while the two focus entirely upon the job at hand. There has grown to be a bit of tense anxiousness between the two of them as Jimmy feels frustrated that the feeling of being trapped is so easily ignored by Tom. There comes a certain freedom in acknowledgment with societal norms, which lead to extreme disdain for the status quo, when there isn't a wife and children that take priority. Jimmy understands that, but also has to understand that without more people seeing the problem then the problem will continue to become exacerbated.

The time was nearing for lunch to come. Jimmy considers momentarily how a thirty minute break to drive somewhere, get food, eat the food, and then get back to the job site seems woefully stressful. There is no downtime. There is no decompression. Briefly, he gets a thought of how his last relationship was constant chaos, but he doesn't connect the dots.

"I really want to try this restaurant up the road a bit, Tom. We are never on this side of town and it would be the perfect opportunity."

"Nah, man. That shit will take too long. You know we don't have time for that."

"It would only be about an extra fifteen minutes or so. One day wouldn't hurt anything."

"Just be happy we get to eat."

"We get to eat because we would otherwise die." The tense silence comes back into play as they pull into the closest fast food.

Every fry and every bite of his sandwich tasted like a painful regret surfacing through the underbelly of his madness. His discontent with life has grown too large to ignore any longer - it has been too much to ignore for longer than he realizes, but now it is overflowing to where the compulsion to bring it up is too much.

The two men finish their lunch in silence before heading back to the concrete slab with partially wood framed walls. Jimmy looks through the skeleton of a home as if it doesn't exist while putting on his tool belt and begins putting on his PPE.

"Man, fuck this. I can't keep doing this. I quit." He throws down the protective equipment he has not yet put on, and then takes off those he has and begins walking to his car."

"Dude, we have a fucking job to do. Just get back here and let's finish this fucking day."

"Fuck that. Shit isn't worth it."

"If we don't finish this fucking job, we won't get paid. Get your ass back here."

"They can pay me for what I have already done and then fuck off with the rest." Jimmy keeps walking off as Tom gets louder, to a point of almost yelling.

"Bro! I can't do this fucking shit alone. Come on, man. Its just a fucking job!"

Jimmy keeps walking without saying anything else until he gets to his car. He tosses his tool loaded toolbelt into the front passenger seat, fires up the car, and then moves the car from park to drive. He can see in the rearview that Tom is moving closer to the car with an absurdly confused look upon his face. Jimmy releases his foot off of the brake pedal and begins moving towards the middle of nowhere.

He spends the next several hours just driving aimlessly. His phone rings incessantly, with Tom and the owner of the company's numbers illuminating one after and another on repeat. Feelings of grief, worry, joy, relief, weightiness, and weightlessness come and go in random order and with random intervals. He has no idea what he is going to do next, but he knows that he can't do the same thing over and over again while expecting anything in his life to get better.

After all the hours of aimless driving, he finally finds himself at his home with a drink in his hand. And that was followed by another. And then another. Eventually, he loses count, and the rest of the night fades away into obscurity.

The alarm set on his phone wakes him far earlier than he would like. He looks down at the phone and sees 78 missed calls with countless voicemails. They are all from the same two people. He knows what it is all about. He hits the delete button without listening to a single one of the voicemails, and clears out the notifications to the call log. He rubs his eyes as his head throbs with an intensity he can't recall ever feeling, but he instinctually finds himself dialing a phone number.

The person on the other end answers, stopping the ringing, but says nothing.

"Hey.... I am really sorry about yesterday. Still need my help?"

"Yeah, get your ass back to the job."

-Dustin S. Stover