Read by Nathan Unthank (4th story in podcast, at 1h 3min)
When I think of heaven, I imagine a vast room full of plastic bricks. Millions of them, shelves and drawers stretching to infinity; a rainbow library of possibility. Every element is there, every colour, shape, size and shade: tiles and baseplates, wedges and wheels, everything you need to make anything you could ever want. And all I have to do is build it.
Most kids never grow up to achieve their dreams: aspiring astronauts end up account-managers, dinosaur-hunters become driving-instructors, would-be YouTube superstars churn out unboxing videos sponsored by Poundland. But I’m lucky. All I ever wanted was to build Lego. And now I get to do it for a cash prize, on TV.
Mr Brick is a Lego … genius is too small a word. Like Mozart, Shakespeare, Einstein, Messi, he stands majestic and alone. Everyone knows Ole Kirk Christiansen invented Lego, but Mr Brick elevated it to an art-form. First to solve the Möbius sixteen-stud problem. Fastest solo million-brick build. Who hasn’t watched his iconic spaceship build, livestreamed from orbit?
He’s an ordinary-looking middle-aged man. Brown hair, brown eyes, stocky build, plaid shirt; unassuming. When interviewers ask how he creates his incredible builds, he just shrugs and says in that soft, straightforward voice: “Brick by brick.” If he were a minifigure, he wouldn’t be the hero of your scene: perhaps a background character, a smiling barrel-shaped face in the crowd. But as with his giant-sized, anatomically-correct model of the human body, it’s what’s on the inside that counts. A fire pure as the heart of a star, blazing with a passion for Lego.
Chess has its grandmasters, the Olympics their gold-medallists. But there is only one Mr Brick. And he will judge us all.
*
Episode One was Imaginary Creatures: ten hopefuls in a vast draughty studio cold enough to pack meat in, fingers numbing as we laboured to complete a plastic menagerie of sphinxes, yetis, fairies and trolls. A great build, the producers informed us, was about storytelling, aesthetics and technical ability. Just like reality TV, I thought, as I started work on my classic dragon. Without a compelling backstory or visual appeal, I’d have to stake everything on my skill. Fine by me.
The first challenge always sorts the herd, especially in serious Lego. People lie, bricks don’t, and Lego gives you nowhere to hide: unlike in other spheres of human interaction, you can’t talk yourself out of a clumsy build, snatch victory from mediocrity. Speed-building the Technic dragon-skeleton and flapping wings attracted admiring stares (or possibly death-glares, I was both unsure and indifferent); and surreptitiously, I watched the others work.
As pre-show research I’d diligently streamed several reality series, both skill-based and personality-centred, and could thus identify my fellow-contestants’ broad types: the MILFy mumfluencer in a low-cut top there for the personal branding, the consciously wacky reality-reject doing it for the future D-list presenting career. Competent, but lacking technique, talent or both.
Some seemed potential contenders: three teen rivals of the amateur-challenge circuit, two fatbeard frenemies from the forums. A frustrated Dad with a basement Lego-room I bet every brick in Denmark his kids weren’t allowed near. One girl, Maisie, all unicorn dungarees and glitter-eyeliner, cosplayed as a minifig at weekends. She’d soon be eliminated, an ill-conceived mermaid her downfall, though I found her brief presence oddly comforting. Usually, in any given sample of humans, I was the weirdo. Not on this show.
Around me, monsters were born. In one hour, I realised, our finished builds would be presented to Mr Brick, and suddenly I was shaking. All my life I’d imagined meeting him in person, showing him my own creations. But the dragon’s mouth was all wrong. My eyes blurred, sweaty fingers fumbled, dropping tiny red scales as I tried to fix it.
I sensed something at my shoulder. The weight of a gaze, like the warmth of a hand lightly laid there. And I felt that thrill, that shuddering tingle that signals the presence of greatness.
Mr Brick had entered the build-room: unscheduled, unannounced, like a monarch walking incognito among his subjects; like a god descended from Olympus. And he was watching me build.
He examined my dragon for long minutes, circling it slowly to get all the angles, bending and peering with those piercing brown eyes. I concentrated furiously on the fiddly jaw, praying he wouldn’t look at me. I couldn’t imagine meeting his gaze; like staring into the sun.
He said nothing. But as he turned away, he gave a small nod, and my chest lit up like the Lego Store window.
I won. Of course I did.
*
The next building-challenges were, frankly, child’s play. A medieval fortress? I’d been constructing castles since I could hold a brick. A fantasy landscape? Elementary, especially given my dragon expertise. A pirate-ship: I went steampunk, mechanised both cannons and sails, and cruised to glory.
A lesson I soon absorbed from watching the other contestants was the expected reaction to certain developments: a mid-episode twist, a shock breakage, a sudden-death elimination. Reality-shows thrive on drama. Suspense, surprise, fights if possible, tension and tears if not. That was what I built to escape: still, I learned to make the sad-sympathy face when someone knocked their almost-complete model off the table. The panic-face with ten minutes to go. The happy-face when I won. I found it helpful to picture the expressions on the tiny heads of the minifigures at these times.
Task Five was a statue of a hero: too obvious, of course, to sculpt Mr Brick himself, so against the lopsided Taylor Swift, clumsy Obama and basic-bitch Batman I presented a life-sized bust of Ole Christiansen. The smile on Mr Brick’s face as the old man’s head took shape told me I’d clinched it before the build was half-done. By my sixth consecutive win I’d mastered manufacturing visible delight, by playing “Everything is Awesome” from the Lego Movie in my head.
The producers nicknamed me Brick Machine: silent, focused, poker-faced, laying down flawless builds with robotic speed and precision. While the others had all arrived at the contestants’ hotel with suitcases of tech, toiletries and TV outfits, mine had been filled to the brim with Lego. I lacked human interest, but I was objectively the best. Unstoppable.
*
By the final, three remained: predictably, a teen, a fatbeard, and me. Mr Brick beamed like he had a wonderful secret as he revealed our last challenge.
“This time,” he said, “we’re going to test you to destruction.”
The producers grinned. I knew they itched to see me break. My builds were self-evidently superior, yet the mood had soured against me. That was TV, I supposed. That was reality.
“This time,” he continued, “we’re going to break your creation.”
What?
The fatbeard looked confused. The teen looked excited. I felt my chest collapse. My fingers numbed; my brain went blank as an empty baseplate. White noise fuzzed in my head.
No. No! I build, I don’t break.
“You’ll make two models, the second one inside the first, so when it breaks it reveals a secret. Anything you like! Surprise us, delight us, shock us: but show us what’s inside.”
A camera zoomed on my stricken face. I knew what the producers were thinking, because I was thinking it too.
There’s nothing inside.
“Tonight you’ll create your concept, and tomorrow it’s a twelve-hour build. Enjoy!”
The camera panned, pulled out, stopped rolling. Eyes backlit with ideas, my rivals hustled off-set. I stood stiff as a minifig.
Mr Brick walked over to me. We’d never spoken off-camera. I couldn’t meet his eyes. I was going to fail him, and he knew it too.
A hand on my shoulder; warm, light. “Listen,” he said, “I know you’re the quiet type. You like to let the bricks do the talking, but this time you gotta listen to them. Lego is about communication, connection. Build what’s in your heart. What are the bricks saying to you? What do they want to be?”
I tried not to think how that hand had laid the millionth brick on his masterpiece; the iconic shot where it snatched an astronaut minifig spinning in freefall on the International Space Station, Earth glowing behind. How those stubby, stud-hardened fingers had sketched the elegant solution to the Möbius problem.
“You’ve got this."
*
That night I don’t sleep. I try to lever Mr Brick out of my thoughts, but he’s stuck fast as a tile on a plate, pressed too tight to wedge a fingernail in, never mind a brick-separator.
Eventually I give up. I sit in my bare hotel-bedroom, watched silently by dozens of my practice-builds, streaming videos of Mr Brick’s legendary builds. The million-bricks, the ISS, the human anatomy; his life-sized mosaic of the Sistine Chapel ceiling. The Tree of Life, the Mutant Angel, the nine circles of Dante’s Inferno, with over a thousand minifigs. I study all his subtle technical tricks, analysing how he executes them. I consume every build, hoping to absorb its essence, their magic. Striving to understand how deeply he understands the bricks, sees the world through them: like gazing through a transparent two-by-one and seeing the possibilities on the other side.
You can feel it when he enters the construction room. The electric crackle of excitement as he pauses at a table; the laser-bright focus of his gaze as it sweeps across a build, probing, appreciating, interrogating, perceiving not only what it is, but what it could be. What it wants to become.
Build what’s in your heart, he said.
I feel I’ve been sorting through a mountain of Lego my whole life; raking every brick, stud, plate and tile, the rattle and clatter in my brain relentless, as I search for that one piece I need. Building has always been how I block the world out, lock it away: elements summoning themselves from the brick-room of my imagination; lining up, rotating, pressing themselves together into the thing they were always meant to be.
I was happy, alone with the builds, there in my safe, blank space. But now Mr Brick’s in there with me. And I don’t know if I like it.
*
The clock starts on the final challenge. It takes me ten of the twelve hours to construct a two-foot, anatomically-correct, mechanically-beating heart, a homage to Mr Brick’s own human body masterpiece. But I still have no idea what to put inside. Lego is my life; but how can I turn my empty life into Lego?
I stare stupidly at my useless hands; I’m dizzy, sick, sheeted in cold sweat. I’ve heard about builders’ block, brick-blindness, but I never understood what it meant. Now I do.
“Brick Machine’s stalled.” A camera swoops gleefully on my bloodless face, my empty fingers. I fumble in my tub, clutch a fistful of bricks and look down. Blue, red and yellow, classic two-by-fours.
I remember the first time I ever saw Lego: the primary colours, the sharp simple shapes, hard and precise and logical. How it spoke to me. And inside, something clicks. I press the yellow brick into a baseplate. Put the red next to it. Add the blue on top.
How do you create your incredible builds?
And his voice in my head says: Brick by brick.
*
They call it the “Ultimate Heartbreak”: 1.7 million views on YouTube, and counting. But when Mr Brick cracks open my Lego heart, I don’t even look at it: I know what’s inside. No: I watch his face. Mr Brick looks up at me. I don’t know if I’ve won. I don’t care. Because at last I can meet his eyes.
Inside is a house like a child might make, built entirely, explicitly of Lego, with blocky walls of different-coloured bricks and a bright red roof which lifts off to reveal a three-inch model of my kid self building an identical Lego house. Inside that house is a minifigure of me, building a still smaller house made of red and blue and yellow Lego in which a microfigure is just visible, building a tiny heart.
(c) MJ Lee, 2025
Nathan Unthank (left) trained at ALRA North from 2013-16 & has since worked across theatre, television & film. Recent credits include playing serial killer Joel Rifkin in World’s Most Evil Killers (Sky Crime) & the anthropomorphic SOCK in Jessica’s Next Top Underwear (LFA). As well as an actor, Nathan is a puppeteer!
MJ Lee is a visual artist exploring poetry & fiction from Margate, with forays to a Welsh writers’ colony. A previous story for Liars' League was art/drug tale “Not Raven But Drowning”.
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