You never know when one thing might become another. Like the letters I wrote — they all became bricks before I could mail them. Little grey concrete bricks. I didn’t have any use for the bricks, so they formed a pile in the corner of my living room which grew and grew with each subsequent failure of a letter. A thin layer of powdered concrete covered the floor over there, in the corner around the increasingly substantial pile. Because I couldn’t get my letters into the mail quick enough.
I tried to dissect one of the bricks. I thought maybe my letter would be inside — maybe the letters weren’t turning into bricks so much as growing concrete brick shells. I carried this brick outside, onto the sidewalk, placed it carefully in the exact center of the sidewalk, width-wise. Then I went back in to fetch the sledgehammer I borrowed from my neighbor Kenny. It took about fifteen minutes to satisfactorily demolish the brick. No letter inside, of course. But I couldn’t dismiss the possibility that the substance of the letter filled the brick in powder form, mixed into the concrete somehow.
Fortunately, a friend of mine worked as an aid in a nearby university laboratory. I brought her the crumbled remains of the brick at an appointed time. In a petri dish, she mixed some of the concrete powder with drops of a purple fluid before placing the dish beneath a microscope. She operated quickly, efficiently, and silently, a priestess of the observable world in her flowing white lab coat. After a few minutes hunched over the microscope, muttering prayers, she looked at me.
Looks like these bricks are thirty years old, she said.
Well, that was impossible. I was thirty years old. The now-demolished brick had appeared on my kitchen table two weeks ago, in place of a letter I hadn’t finished writing.
The next week, I tried a different approach. I actually mailed one of the bricks, hoping it might become a letter again in route to its recipient. I boxed it up and paid an exorbitantly high postage fee due to the weight.
Three days later, my brother called me up.
Why did you send me a brick? he said.
Ah, damn, I said.
I have a family, you know, he said.
Right.
You can’t just send me bricks.
I’m sorry, I said.
I’m mailing it back to you, he said.
The pile of bricks grew larger and larger until I decided to stop writing letters . Then I thought I might as well build something, since I had so many bricks. Besides, I had lots of free time now that I wasn’t writing letters. I carried them one by one into the back yard. Technically, I shared the yard with the three other occupants of our building, but nobody ever went out there but me, it seemed. In nice weather, I liked to lie down in the grass and hear the powerlines hum overhead. Sometimes a helicopter flew by, or a bird.
The only thing I could think to build was a small outdoor fireplace with chimney. I borrowed my neighbor Kenny’s wheelbarrow, mixed up an old bag of concrete, and got to work pasting bricks together in the proper shape — an arched mouth and gently sloped belly leading up to a hexagonal chimney column. Unfortunately, I was one brick short — I needed the sixth brick to finish the uppermost row of the chimney. No problem, I thought. I’ll go inside and try to write a letter.
Except this time, the letter didn’t become a brick. Of course, I thought. Just when I need a brick, I get a letter instead. So I sealed the letter in an envelope and mailed it, hoping it might become a brick on the way. Then my brother would call me up, complain, and mail the brick back to me, and I’d have a brick.
Hello? I said when the phone rang three days later.
What is wrong with you, said my brother.
I’m sorry, I said. I noticed he was actually crying. Or maybe he had allergies — I couldn’t remember if he always got allergies or not.
Why would you send me this? he said. This awful letter.
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Parker Young lives in Chicago. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Hobart, Bluestem, and Oyez Review.
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