“A Testament to Lost Things Regained” by Michael Peck

The architect is a master of sharp corners. Some of his corners are as perplexing as malice in fairy tales. Others as treacherous as minor chords first thing in the morning.

We’re waiting for him to emerge from the office he has built himself into with his own entangled corners. We fear that he may not find his way out from his own entangled corners. No one has ever witnessed the architect applying his theory of corners, except for the tired old elevator man who waits relentlessly to be killed, or to be spoken to.

Now we’re in a stairwell whose corners are as complex and convulsive as vacillating thieves.

The architect says that the horizontal, like the number 4, is unimportant, but that the idea of it is not. Corners disrupt the inherent monotony of democracy, the architect says.

True, the corner as reinvigorated by the architect is the new labyrinth in the era of simple things.

Inside the architect’s office the brash histrionics of radio organ music.

We must have corners. He knows that we must have corners. But his corners are subversive.

Corners are his philosophy.

His emptied smirk after love.

His uncultivated wilderness.

His his.

No one knows if he has ever left his office here.

That’s his secret: there is no secret.

Because in reality his corners could be anyone’s, woven into chimeras we constructed ourselves. Formed into fantasies of what a corner should be.

Noises erupt from behind the frosted-glass door as the architect searches for a path out of his office.

More fiction at Used Furniture.

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