I woke with a deep chill running through me. I hadn’t slept long. Partly it was just habit, used to sleeping in short bursts, but it seemed I’d woken because my body wasn’t doing well.
“Ngh.”
My body creaked with every movement, as if it had seized up. Like a rusted machine without enough oil, I barely managed to brace myself against the floor and push my back upright. Leaning against the wall, I blinked slowly through a wave of dizziness.
This is insane.
My body wouldn’t listen to me.
I could tell right away something was seriously wrong.
“Cough.“
The coughing started, and my body felt feverish. My shoulder, wrenched and slammed against the bed frame, hadn’t improved at all. Still, I got up. I had a part-time job to get to.
Next up was day labor at a construction site. It was physically demanding work, and I knew my current condition wasn’t up to it, but I couldn’t afford to give it up.
The pay was high precisely because the spots were so competitive. The only reason they still called me in was because I was still young and had worked diligently up to now. With all four limbs still intact, a bit of coughing and a fever weren’t even close to a good enough excuse to skip out.
I’d bought painkillers from the pharmacy for exactly this kind of situation, so I popped two of them. The label said fast-acting fever reducer and painkiller, so I put my faith in that alone.
“Cough.“
Every cough scraped at my dry throat like sandpaper. I changed into dry clothes first. My whole body was bruised, and around my stomach it had turned almost black. I pulled my shirt down to cover it and grabbed my work clothes. My vision blurred, so I rubbed at my eyes roughly and checked the time on my phone.
Still got some time.
Since I wasn’t going to the sauna job, I still had about three and a half hours left. Normally this would be a good time to grab a meal or squeeze in a few more hours of sleep, but right now, there was something else I needed to do first.
The mascot head, tossed carelessly aside.
If I didn’t dry it soon, all that washing would have been for nothing.
I picked it up to take it to the coin dryer before it started rotting again from sitting wet. I hadn’t noticed it while wearing it, but now the dampness against my palms felt unpleasant.
I dragged my heavy body to the coin laundromat, ten minutes away. Luckily, one dryer was free, so I put the mascot head in.
I sat in front of it, watching it spin.
“Cough.“
The coughing showed no sign of stopping, and sitting still like this only made the pain in my body feel even sharper.
Fast-acting my ass.
Two painkillers weren’t going to cut it. I knew I should go to a hospital if I was this sick, but I didn’t have time for that.
If I just push through, it’ll dull eventually.
I’d get used to it. Like I always had, up until now.
I tossed the dried mascot head into my room and headed to the construction site. But there were far more unfamiliar faces there than familiar ones.
“Hey, kid’s here?”
Mr. Lee, a welding specialist, was the first to recognize me. It seemed like I was the only familiar face left for him too, out of the whole crew. Something felt off about the place.
“A lot of new faces.”
“You could say the veterans are basically all gone.”
He already looked exhausted, even before the work had started.
“The union workers went on strike over wage issues, and the fallout landed here too. They swapped everyone out because labor costs got too expensive.”
“I see… Cough.“
“Hm? Catching a cold?”
“Just a bit of a cough. It won’t get in the way of work.”
“Alright, just push through somehow today. There’ll probably be talk from up top anyway.”
I nodded instead of answering.
Construction sites, being so safety-sensitive, were always full of harsh language. Cursing came naturally enough there as a rule, but today felt especially tense. Most of the regular crew were gone, leaving only rookies who’d shown up just to collect a day’s wage. Most of them couldn’t tell construction terminology apart, let alone identify equipment, so they botched even simple instructions — no wonder voices kept rising.
“You crazy son of a bitch! Hey, you fucking bastard! You trying to get your skull cracked open?!”
“You absolute mongrel bastard! Does this look like a ‘piece’ to your eyes? Does it?!”
“The concrete mixer’s coming through! Get the hell out of the way!”
Curses and shouting crossed back and forth, and the whole site felt like it was coated in a thin layer of ice.
With everyone out of sync, things kept going wrong, and on top of that, some people ignored safety rules out of stubbornness or sheer ignorance — not wearing their helmets properly, not even putting on safety boots.
A ragtag mess, in every sense of the word.
Right when it felt like an accident could happen any second, someone showed up with an attitude, picking a fight.
“For fuck’s sake. The foreman said any shoes were fine, so why are you getting on my case about it?”
“What’d you say, you little shit?”
“Why’s it just me you’re yelling at. That guy over there’s just wearing sneakers too.”
The “guy over there” he pointed at was me. I’d been moving materials, and being suddenly singled out left me a little dumbfounded. The man looked younger than me — probably a college student or someone job-hunting. With no real experience in this world, he apparently assumed all safety boots just looked crude and clunky. What I had on were, in fact, proper safety boots.
What he had on, meanwhile, were canvas sneakers.
This lunatic.
A curse slipped out in my head, unbidden.
It was right as Canvas-Shoes shook off Mr. Lee’s arm and pushed his way stubbornly into the work zone.
“Aaagh!”
A piercing scream rang out, and Canvas-Shoes dropped to the ground on the spot. His white canvas sneaker started turning red. He’d stepped on a protruding nail. He jumped up, flailing, and in doing so, knocked into a stack of materials propped up nearby.
The improperly secured materials began toppling toward him.
Still reeling from the shock of the nail in his foot, the man just stood there, staring at the materials collapsing toward him. The crazy bastard hadn’t even been wearing a helmet.
Being relatively close to him, I lunged in an instant, grabbed Canvas-Shoes by the back of the collar, and yanked him backward. With my other hand, I caught the falling materials before they could hit him.
Crack.
“…!”
A sound far too sickening to be coming from a shoulder.
I knew something had gone badly wrong, but it was already too late.
The other workers rushed over and cleared the materials pinning me down, but I couldn’t get back up off the ground. One arm hung uselessly, with no strength left in it at all. I was loaded into an ambulance and taken to the hospital. The diagnosis: a fracture from damage to the head of the humerus. The terms were too technical, so I asked them to explain it more simply.
“Basically, your shoulder was already misaligned, and the impact on top of that led directly to the fracture. In a case like this, the outlook tends to be poor. So after surgery, you’ll need to avoid any strenuous activity going forward…”
The doctor kept talking, but all I really understood was that my shoulder was broken.
It went without saying — I was let go from the day-labor job. On top of that, since I hadn’t been wearing the standardized safety boots laid out in some manual that had never existed before, I was told no compensation beyond basic medical costs would be provided.
That part, I didn’t care about either way. The problem was that when the various bosses saw the state of my face and arm — having refused hospitalization right after surgery and shown up for work anyway — they all said the exact same thing.
“Seo Haegil, you don’t need to come in anymore.”
At the serving job, too.
“We know how hard you’ve worked for us, Seo Haegil. But you understand — this job’s tough to do with one hand.”
At the delivery job, too.
“Haegil, I heard you hurt your arm? Goodness, and you’re coughing too. Even you need to rest when it’s that bad.”
Even the sauna owner, supposedly still mid-remodel, somehow found out and called.
All of them, gone. Or about to be. The only job I had left that hadn’t let me go was the mascot costume gig. I spent a blank, hollow afternoon, and at 1 a.m., without much hope, picked up the mascot head and headed to West Hollywood.
“Hm? Did you hurt your arm?”
“Yes….”
The owner asked the moment he saw me. After hearing nothing but termination after termination all day, I was feeling a little beaten down already. Watching me, the owner only made more of a fuss.
“Look at your face, all rotten! If you’d put on a cast, you should’ve said something! Why’d you even bother showing up like this?”
“…….”
Was I getting fired here too. After all that trouble washing the mascot head, it was all for someone else’s benefit now. I set the mascot head down and turned to leave.
“Hm? Where are you going?”
“Aren’t I fired?”
“Hm? Are you saying you want to quit right now?”
“What?”
“Well, can’t be helped then — come back once you’ve healed up.”
The owner added, looking at me like I was a little slow on the uptake,
“You’re doing the escort job, like we agreed.”
“No.”
At my firm refusal, the owner’s expression went blank for a moment.
“It pays nowhere near what you’re making now, you know that?”
“No.”
“You know how careful we are about who we let in, right? Our guests are so gentlemanly, inside and out, sometimes I wonder if we should be the ones paying them for the privilege.”
“No.”
That “gentlemanly” guest was exactly the reason I currently had a seven-week recovery ahead of me.
“It’s not the sleazy kind of place you’re imagining! No pressure for a second or third round, it’s totally wholesome!”
“No.”
Using the word “wholesome” for a place like this. Was there anything more contradictory than that?
I had no idea what the owner saw in some shitty-looking guy like me to think I had product value, but I had no intention of waiting for my body to heal just so I could become an escort.
