BRICKS

The cracks between each of the red bricks on the ground seemed to be proudly aware of their own length, width and blackness. Yet were those dark spaces between each of the bricks actually composed of anything other than the abscence of stuff? Each brick seemed to unsteadily collide with the other; they all made untidy unions, of a sort. Yet there was, visibly, recognizably, those gaps between each of them, long enough, and wide enough, to stick your finger into. Was it a trick of the light, these lodgings without tenants? No, they existed. You could get your thumb stuck in them. But why couldn't the bricks be shoved together, directly aside one another? Then there would be no gaps at all. Wasn't that doable? Unless the gaps were a necesary part of the whole enterprise. If you just looked at two bricks molded beside one another, 'arbitrary' might be the word to describe their collision. Just two hunks of mortar, with a pinky-length hole between each. Looking at the entire range of path revealed a larger, denser sort of deal. There must have been two, two hundred and fifty of them. Fraternal twins, with the occasional stony brow that resembled its mate. Two by two. Front, behind, beside. And between each pair, that familiar black gap. Looking at all those gaps together, at one time, in between all that gobstopper red, gave light to all those little lines of black assembled together like jagged zebra stripes that had somehow slid off their elegant beast. You almost believed that they made up a pattern, even a language, a collection of jagged characters that could even be said to resemble abandoned musical notes all clumped together in an unlikely search for the white crisp of sheet music. (If the cock-eyed view of your eyes could be given some credence.) All those ebony spaces knitted together almost made the surrounding red brick a superfluous lump. Might be because a series of shadowy, inch-deep chasms induces more conspiratorial thinking than the oblong normality of most rusty placeholders.