I must set the scene: Outside the building, spring had emerged. The structure was so superfluous that the earth had to be carved open deeper than usual to facilitate its intrusion. Desperate that the eye should not be jarred oh-so-suddenly, a steep relief was constructed to nudge the eye of the fearful parent down to the building's foundations, to stoke an appreciation of what a fine structure their taxes had gone towards, that their child was traipsing into. The lower floor was tentatively surrounded by a mulch embankment.

The natural violence of rain interrupted the spring. It permeated the mulch present to suppress the weeds, their desire to grow subdued but not extinguished. Underneath the mulch, a dark wrap, the spawn of reforged rectangles. They thrive off inertia. This plastic-mulch embrace mummified the ground. The few trees planted are ornamental, non-native foreign objects, roots embedded in the trapped underground ecology. Here and there a few weeds have triumphed against the wrap; pimples on an earth-body ill-cared for.

* * * *

The rectangles were everywhere, contrary to the cyclical wholeness of nature, perverse in that manufactured way. So common amongst today’s everyman, they had crept, as if sapient, to dominate our lives. Allegedly humanity has been domesticated by crops; wheat, grasses, they flourish under our empires, appropriating swathes of land from the less useful accidents of evolution. But now the greenery must contend with a new competitor – an inanimate one.

I had noticed this, of course, all too late. The handwriting of the children once so forced yet eloquent, devolved into an arthritic mess. “K” s with lumbar problems, the lexicon all together entangled by a new wave of arrogance. That those children – and their teachers too, could no longer write was what drove me to it.

I broke off from my meditations and looked back. A face at the door is partially eclipsed by the light from the hall. I hadn’t seen many eclipses on this side of the year. Eclipses. Where was I going with this? The door. I got up, advanced tremulously, and opened it. The hall was empty. The echo of footsteps lingers in the air – like a disturbed seabed. I paddled through the ripples – shakily – nearly surfaced for want of oxygen. I exhale. No one knew yet.

The week later I had purged the remnants from the building. Pipes expunged. Scholastic budgets are, regardless of the protestations of the various instruments and advocates of bureaucracy, quite limited. Finding janitorial assistance – especially with the previously employed gentleman permanently indisposed – was difficult, to be frank. Diverging from the group to read up on novel cleaning techniques, I was searching for some way to cleanse the smell that hung in the air, unwanted. There are so many unforeseen consequences hiding in this sort of thing. Perusing the book’s margins, my eyes slowly descended through that yellowing labyrinth of diagrams and doodles, hallmarks of the discontented student. It dawned on me that many were from before my time; I had strayed to an older era, when what I had done may have roused some further debate, some further quarrel amongst my peers. But those rectangles. I stopped. My eyes had caught on a face in the margin; that same face that had glanced at me through the door. That same face now scribbled upon the page, recently it seems. Ironic.

The observant student of plumbing may find certain parallels between this most essential modern craft and the quite gaudy pneumatic postal systems currently being considered for removal in that great city of Paris. The epistolary vernacular the experienced plumber learns to parse – from scratches on the worn pipe’s exterior (or interior, should something unwilling to be submerged is flushed) to the greater storytelling imbued in the causes of clogs; reveals the inherent essential quality of our chosen career.

* * * *

A protracted grunt was all that escaped him, it, the now-corpse. Knife exiting chest, light exiting eyes. I bent down, curious s to whether the pupils retained their ability to expand in darkness, a point of interest for the book I'll write. The face is uncooperative, it masked itself with hopelessly eccentirc red tinted glasses - or rather spectacles, for they were that kind of instrument. What ineffectual character may have been attributed to this deadweight vacated the now-corpse upon their removal. They were snpped with the ambivalence of a child towards a neglected pencil. I recall the faint tensing of limbs as I shut the door, our communion concluded.

End of term exams were approaching, punctual, though bemoaned by students and staff alike. Such a vapid flurry of progress for progress’ sake. The rectangles eased us into entropy. That shape obfuscating any reality more intimate than a third-person perspective; pedagogical practice had been debarked for the entertainment of the potential observer.

I move to get up - and the chief of the rectangles crashes to the ground. Pandemonium. The gurgling laughter of my inebriated, deaf-to-the-world charges shoots up through the room. One looks particularly ensconced in a posture of bewildered amusement - their ribs desperately struggling to escape the near brain-dead flesh they are enclosed in. I stride out of the room and spy the cleaners lounging in the sun beams that - thanks to a thoughtful architect, most likely a graduate of our own local institution - evade the classrooms and dominate the halls and their various nooks and crannies. I snap my fingers. Letting out an indignant "excuse me", finally rousing them from whatever petty reflections occupy their time. Doleful eyes meet with mine. Plodding footsteps married with the squeaky swiveling mop-bucket wheel make listening unbearable during their still meditated advance. "There's been an accident," I say, pondering that mop-bucket wheel. Had there been an accident? I had broken something. But there was a nebulous quality to the event - of all events recently - that deprived the matter of any personal agency on my behalf. It had broken itself. Or had it been a conscious decision? I had to get out of the room at some point anyway. Of course, I'm disturbed from my present ponderings by the cleaners. The junior one, at least the younger one anyway stepped forward - attempting to subvert my authority by creating a hallway triumvirate. I step backwards, out of reach as he says "what happened?" "Something broke" I announce. We now walk back to the classroom together, meeting with the stench of hushed conversation still fresh in the air. The janitorial duo grunt as they examine the damage. "These computers are quite expensive you know". Computer. Mathematicians had originally possessed that word before it, and the rest of the world succumbed to a silicon embrace. Nevertheless, I acknowledge my "accident". "I know, I know, but we've the budget to replace such things, no?" I examine their faces to see if any qualms have been propagated by my generalisation. I found nothing. They haul the silicon-based carcass out of the room, leaving some remnants still embedded in the wall. Tentatively, I examine my class. Most are engaged in profiling the contents of their bags, hurriedly obscuring their own rectangles. I cough loudly and the air is filled by the audible swish of turning necks. I scan the room for the one with the ribs. As we make eye contact, I proscribe "remedial lessons”.

Here we are again, recollecting yet again. My thesis is thus: Modern pedagogy’s insistent disavowal of an end to the great stream of academia necessitates a new, subversive approach by those of us enlightened. I am verbose. Yet they will see; they will still grasp the gist of the truth, my “water of life”.

* * * *

All day she sits at her desk and devotes her time to correcting the children. She is ignorant, but neither clever nor self-assured enough for true arrogance. We’ve seen her before, parceled into many disparate forms. But to where is she being delivered, unbeknownst to her? I walk by her doorway; the light is bright; I can just barely make her out. I move on, further down the hall: much to be done. The building is labyrinthine to newcomers, but not to us.

Later, I am walking home. The structure stays illuminated at all hours, a superfluous testament to the ideal of institutional permanence. They try to make it seem living and upon pronouncing its birth, it is stillborn. A lone car is the tongue in the mouth of the car park. The bright white headlights deprive the street of any ambiance that would have prevailed in the warm streetlamps. Just as I pass the leering gaze of the headlights, the car pulls out slowly. She’s just sitting there as it trundles along, her eyes boring into that middle distance just beyond the steering wheel. The night scenery, the punctuating streetlamps, I, seemingly only register as a footnote to her. We drift from alongside the car to a pool in her periphery.

* * * *

I have divorced myself from the building, perhaps for the last time. I had always observed the balcony through layers; I would look and see a leaf framed by glass, metal, a half open door, the wall the door is embedded in, the blurry outline of my nose, the beginnings of physical self-perception, my skin, but not myself. I cannot always perceive my being. There would be days of this, devoid of self-truth, but what a wonderful thing to finally see. Yourself. Being, whole, the euphoria of interconnectedness. You can see when someone has experienced this or not. I would suppose there are those that have never had this happiness thrust upon them. It’s an affliction of the subtle body then expressed in the physical self. I can see the whole at times, in this state of framing, of interconnectedness. That leaf out there, it darts from the confines of my perception at times; is it waving in the wind? Sunbeams sustain it now that the rain is finished. It glistens with a rigid elasticity that only the young have. What is old becomes brittle and broken. My perception of the window-leaf-door body is only possible from a finite number of angles – does this perceived body cease to be upon the turn of my gaze? I have perhaps been too forward in my actions, presupposing that the angles of others’ gazes match mine. The leaf from another angle takes a new life, a new reflective potential.

So here I am. On the balcony. I gaze down, mulched beds, ornamental trees, manhole covers and now a new mound. A subtle mound, at that. Bodies within bodies, ecologies within ecologies. But soon the mulch will part, by accident or with purpose, the surrounding trees’ leaves will lose their lustre. And someone will investigate. And what will they find? I can honestly say I don't know now. Perhaps that face from the margin. Perhaps me.