Red Object

He challenged me to tell the unknown story. The challenge is taken.

All plotlines open in ambiguity. In mystery. What is this Red Object? Who came to gawk at its redness amid the cindeblock edifice? All back alleys pulsate with life verminous and virtuous, with charms hidden and exposed and washing down the gutters. One time some small children came to the curtains and waited for the puppet show. Junkies would put their crumpled bills behind the curtain, walk away and come back in precisely seven minutes according to instructions but they would never find anything. It once housed three trophies won by a soccer team that was named as a portmanteau of the names of the coach's two stillborn children. Hard-boiled bouncers leaned on the Red Object. The Red Object: an obelisk poiting to some long-forgotten before-time; the kind of Object that just works and nobody can tell a story as to how. Was it ever a fishbowl to entertain a lower-class constituency that had precious little to do but watch darting fishes? Could it have been a lectern for a midget politician in the early 20th century when that kind of thing was still acceptable? Did it frame the fearos of our ancestors, a kind of "safe-box" into which you crawled so the ghosts could not bite you? Or was it a kind of air-filter, mediating between the insides of the nondescript building and the capricious weather-changes of the nodescript street?

There is no plot in all this lie. So the story remains untold. It remains speculative at best. But it comforts me so to hear once again the clack-clack of the keyboard in this context.

Consider: "Communism doesn't work because people like to own stuff."