One on top of another, he stacked them, carefully judging each gap before easing a brick into place. He turned every one in his hands first, feeling for its flaws, its weight, its hidden strength. There was something about bricks no one else seemed to know. In his hands, they came alive. They spoke.
Each had a character of its own. Some wanted the centre, some the corner, some the quiet pressure of being buried deep inside the wall. If you listened closely enough, you could tell where each belonged. There was one perfect place for every brick, and once, he had known how to find it.
People called it menial work. He had believed otherwise. He had looked at his hands with pride: the ugly cracks, the calluses, the half-healed cuts, the broken nails that made others pull away. He knew the look in their eyes, the silent warning: don’t touch me.
But his hands had been more than roughness. They were proof of longing. Of labour. Of an endless search for shelter, safety, and belonging. They were hope. They were faith.
That was why he built. Day after day, wrapped in thankless labour, he raised walls for other people’s dreams. Each finished line of brick felt like a step towards some answered prayer. He was good at it, too. Good enough to believe that sacrifice might count for something when judgement finally came for the dim, unsettled shore of his life.
But years passed.
Pride curdled into shame. Hope thinned into loss. The old scorn in other people’s eyes became harder to bear, and his hands, once certain, almost holy, grew stiff, painful, and clumsy.
It is difficult to romanticise the thing that slowly breaks you. The work that had once moved through him like music became a chore, a slow leaching of the soul. He built beautiful homes and knew he would never live in them. He raised other people’s paradises while returning each evening to his own small ruin.
Now the bricks no longer dance. The music has faded to a whisper. He still hums at his work, off-key and under his breath, as if a repentant song might coax life back into them.
But lifeless things stay dead when you have no breath left to give.
Hope is a fallen house. An empty table. Unpaid bills. Dust in the lungs and fire in the joints. Hope is buried in the rafters of homes he built for others.
And faith?
Faith is mortar gone hard. It is a bone buried too deep for any dog to find. It is sleepless nights, faceless stares, cracked skin, and broken nails.
Faith is what he sealed into the walls.
And it cannot be rebuilt.
It is silent brick and hardened mortar.
It is a bricklayer’s faith.
INSTANT NOODLES 