Secret Life
Soon, even the strip mall lay abandoned. Birds flew overhead in thick flocks. The fruit of the vine fell where it would and took root everywhere. Stone and vine and steel, the slumped ruins of the building stood guard over squirrels and trees.
Beneath the ground, the Head Janitor railed and shouted at his staff. They had successfully sealed off the basement from the vine, but now found their philosophy as useless as a basement without a building.
Lighthouse
One woman remained in the building, even after silence had fallen over it, even after the janitors had given up their struggle. Every afternoon she would walk from her apartment and climb through the rubble to her office with its ever-empty APPROVED box. The mice had long since left. She didn’t mind—she was happy for them. They would send her words throughout the world and one day they would come back and tell her tales of where they had been.
She had long gray hair now, but her stance remained straight as she stood by the cracked window, framed by the hissing half-light of tentative fluorescent lamps powered by a failing emergency generator.
The woman neither lamented nor welcomed the death of the building. It was unimportant to her. She came back because there was nowhere else to go and nothing else to do. Her check, issued by some central location, was hiccupped out to her at irregular intervals by some bureaucracy that had not heard of the building’s fate.
Nothing ever changed.
In a way, she found it peaceful looking out across the green, watching the way the clouds sped across the sky. Through the broken glass, the wind sometimes leapt into her office and she would close her eyes and enjoy the sensation of it against her face. She had lost her voice, but felt she did not need it anymore.
Sometimes she would walk through the crumpled passageways, the corridors that led to unexpected light, and wonder about her coworkers. She had never really known them before. Now, though, by the things they had left behind, she knew them well. She had found love letters buried in the rubble once. Another time, a wrapped present. Fingerprints on a windowpane had caused her to stop and examine them, wondering who they had belonged to, why they had felt the need to place their entire hand against the glass…
Every night she would let the emergency generator sleep, turning out the lights on her floor. The stars would come out all at once, soft and glistening. The world would be reduced to a shadow, a coolness. At such times, she would wrap her shawl more tightly around her and look back over her life—at the spaces in her life, the gaps—and she would be only a little sad.
After a while, she would take out her flashlight and shine it into the darkness, slowly turning and turning. The darkness ate the light. She couldn’t really see anything clearly—just the outlines of shapes, of the vine, of the dull, reflective chrome of a distant car, approaching the gloom of the southern border.
She did this for many nights. She didn’t know what she expected to find, or why she had decided to shine the light. She only knew that the ruination of the building had released something within her. So she held the light and flashed it out into the darkness.
