The Alleynian 713 2025

Buttoned Shut by Daniel Burckle, Year 12

who comes along to fold and then take away the shirt to the bagging station. The boy quite likes working in shirt assembly as the boards that cover the windows are nailed on poorly, so thin ribbons of sunlight trickle in during day shifts, and every now and again he is graced with a faint gust of wind. Not today, however. Hours have passed, the heat has begun to warp the needles curved and the mountain of shirts has not shrunk. The fibres in the boy’s muscles are unravelled by their perpetual motion but still his arms continue to lazily drift between the bag of buttons, the obdurate mound of shirts and the machine. His half decade of experience within his decade-long life has strung his stickish arms to this motion, which the supervisors puppeteer with their smothering gaze as they wander. The little girl comes less and less frequently. She is six so she is still just getting accustomed to work, but soon enough, in the next few months perhaps, the little girl’s labour will have tailored her so that she fits seamlessly into the shop. Boots slide into the boy’s field of view at the foot of the table, a darkened, warped reflection of him trapped on their regularly polished leather surface. Arching his neck, the boy looks up at the supervisor’s bored grey face which suddenly erupts with a frenzy of muffled shouts and a mist of spit. The boy does not hear what the supervi- sor said but he is sure it is something about him not working fast enough. The man’s cane has a gentle curve. In reality it does not matter that the boy stares blankly at the supervisor instead of re- sponding as the result will be the same. The bored man cracks his cane across the boy’s face. It is bent ever so slightly more than it was before. The boy falls to the ground, soon followed by a rain of buttons. The smooth disks are cut from a tube of a brass-looking material and are then sprayed with a variety of chemicals by the boy’s bunk mate to make them seem older. It is beyond the boy in rags why anyone would want to wear

Rows of heads, sheared at the neck by their work- benches, hang over allocated sewing machines as their hands, skeletal and embroidered with scars, guide through eternal lengths of fabric. The youngest carry bags between stations. Their hair cascades down and drapes jagged shapes of shadow onto their gaunt faces. Their knees’ creaks disrupt the rhythmic chatter of the machines as they thread through the warps and the wefts of the shop’s corridors. A boy, wearing an orange rag, cinched tight to his skin by sweat and time, rests his head on the surface of a workbench. It pushes a blunt metal chill past the hollow cavity behind his jaw and through to the top of his skull as it gently rises and falls in juncture with his ribs – each rib clung to by the sheet of colourless translucent skin pulled taut across them. His heavy breathing is shrouded by the echoing clattering of the machines, layered over their clicking and humming. The pile of shirts to his side keeps growing, its shade steadily crawling towards him. A young child stumbles to a stop and heaves a bag of buttons off of his shoulder and onto the boy’s table. The boy peers up, the skin of his cheek peeling unstuck from the table. The young child hovers there like an ashen spectre with his jaw slack, inaudibly gasping in the lint filled air and droplets of sweat off his gleaming skin. Only a foggy foam veils the abysmal expanse behind his eyes – a symptom of the latest strand of illness, which has started infesting the dorms, its victims’ fading strength proving the fact that are alive. The child runs off flat-footedly and, still breathless, is hemmed into the depths of the sweatshop. He will not meet his quota today. The boy pulls off a shirt down from the moun- tain, wipes the glaze of sweat from his face with its sleeve, and begins to sew. One hand reaches into the maw of the plastic bag and yanks out fistfuls of buttons at a time and the other aligns them with the shirt and serves them to the feed dogs by which point there is a tiny fragile girl

pus slithers into the crevices between his tensed fingers. His unheard sobs send ripples across the puddle of buttons surrounding him, which is al- ready being swept up and collected. When he gets up the contour he had created by rocking against the buttons is gone. He looks up at the colossus of shirts and it consumes his vision. They are shirts of all colours, made of silk and linen but they are shirts he will certainly never wear. The boy sits down at his machine and rejoins the tuneless drone of the sweatshop. There are still five hours left in his shift. ◎

old looking clothes and pay to do so. Before the buttons have even fallen to one side, still bouncing and spin- ning on the concrete, the supervisor snatches the boy’s hands to check if they have been damaged. He then carefully sets them free, fixes his sleeves’ cuffs and strides away. The boy coils up into a ball on the concrete, pressing his hand against hot pain sweltering on his split cheek bone. The hot mixture of his tears and

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THE ALLEYNIAN 713

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