The Storage Space would have held its breath, if only a building could breathe to begin with. If only Karen could…or would…breathe.
Ah! There it was! A little snippet of a breath to be sure, but a breath nonetheless.
But then there was nothing. For a long time. And that appalling…color.
Shakespeare… The Storage Space could hear it too. Melodic. Seductive. And drawing Karen closer and closer to death.
It tried to accept the inevitable. Yes, this one had been nice to it. Yes, this was the only one who had ever had the common civility, the even most rudimentary sense of social niceties, to speak to it. The Storage Space would have bucked itself up if only a building… If only a building…
That was it! That was the key! All this time! Centuries! The Storage Space, even back when it referred to itself as Le Grand Theatre, had always been apologetic…deferential…because it was only a building! But did buildings stain the woodwork with centuries of cigar smoke? Pound the originally exquisite carpet with boots encrusted with horse manure? Brush it threadbare with yard upon yard of skirts and petticoats? Park the pocket knives used to clean perpetually filthy fingernails by stabbing their blades into elegant carvings everywhere? Or stab them into each other? Repeatedly? Until…dead, or maybe not even dead, yet…they had to be hidden, left in little nooks and crannies everywhere to rot? All supposedly justified by some offense or other?
The Storage Space had suffered many, many offenses over its countless years. That…”building”…constructed next to it when the ancient tea room was torn down, to name just one. An utterly graceless edifice, it had smashed all seven of its deplorably tasteless floors right up against the most elegant side of Le Grand Theatre, crushing exquisite carvings and darkening its windows like death.
“Oh, no!” Even Karen was horrified.
“Oh, no” indeed! But none of this was done to me by the other building! It was all done by those horrible, miserable creatures not worth being remotely deferential to! And certainly not worth mourning! And Le Grand Theatre, even in the face of this affront, had never risen a hand to its neighboring building. So it wasn’t “if only a building could raise a hand; if only a building had a hand to raise.” It was, thank all that is truly holy that no building ever raised a hand to another building.
“All true, except for one thing…” Karen pointed out.
The Storage Space would have sighed in exasperation if only a building…
“Who built you? Who gave you life?”
The Storage Space brought itself fully out of its reverie and found, to its horror, that it was confronting a version of this Karen that was flickering slowly between the live version and a green mist.
