13

I began to collect bricks long ago, one for every day I was alive. I found them everywhere – in books with crinkly pages and in my mother’s words and in the grocery store aisles. I kept them in my closet, and from time to time I would open the door and sit there in the dark and feel my bricks. Some were lopsided. Some had tiny clicking clocks on their centers. Some disappeared and although I searched in vain for them - swept the back of the closet with my blind fingers, called for them until my voice sang back to me hollow - they seemed to have deserted me.

One day I began to stack them one on top of another. But they seemed to topple every time I left the closet. So I fashioned a cement of sorts, from ink and words and grueling sun-hot days. It worked for a while. The stack began to get bigger, and I stuck it with embellishments of every sort, tops and turrets, spins and spirals, crevices and cornices. By and by it got so I couldn’t recognize it any longer, so I left it alone for time.

A hinge must have broken on the closet door, for when I returned, it flung itself open with a force that exposed the dark to the light and illuminated my castle.

Melancholy of melancholies! My castle was not a castle at all, only bits of newsprint tattered and stained, broken light bulbs smashed and powdered, shiny plastic trinkets cracked and worn.