By Nate Warrows
We are afraid of dying in the object, in the building. Afraid of our own teeth, as each one is a small bit of bone that lives inside our mouth and our bodies, the whole of which can start to waste away if a rotten tooth goes untreated. The building is a looming giant that we live inside. The walls leak never-before-seen fluids— new ones every few months… or maybe, days? No one is quite sure, we try not to think about it. We live inside rooms, in between the walls, but they are not the building, because the building is really the object, but the object hovers on the roof slowly spinning, perhaps pulsing lightly. Or, the building is the object’s stomach and we live inside it.
No, how wrong that would be. We are afraid of dying in the object and thus, if we live inside its stomach then we are in fact NOT living but instead being slowly digested. So yes, the object must be upstairs above us all, because we are afraid to be eaten.
It’s quite natural that a building should contain so many of us in so many rooms – if it were otherwise it would not be what it is! Yes, the building houses us all and keeps us out of the object’s view. It keeps us alive, and so it is a building.
The experts who live among us have taken to studying the object, which many find reassuring. They have lined the roof with mirrors and dedicated a number of rooms as ones to do their work from; monitoring the pulses, the rate at which it spins, and collecting endless fluid samples from the walls. Quite the spectacle of a process, and yet oddly sickening to watch. The experts are generally left alone to do their important work. The rest of us have come to believe that the experiments are meant to calculate the risk that the object’s presence poses to the building.
None of us are allowed on the roof, the experts are the only ones permitted near the object. A few men who live in the building have band together a security force, to protect the object and the value of the experts’ work. Some carry sharpened banister poles, taken from the stairs in the building and outfitted with all sorts of screws and bits of glass and wires that lead to nowhere. Most of us agreed that, since there were experiments being done on the object, surely a security force that acts to protect such important work must be a respectable idea. We grew used to the sight of them throughout the building, and many thought nothing of it because they were protecting the object that was outside the building. We felt comforted, in a way, because indeed, the object could not be the building because the object was outside and we all would, one day, know much more about it! Block bless the building!
We held firm to this belief until the day when a woman with dark hair, who lived in the building, pushed her way past the security forces and their jagged bats, screaming wildly as she made her way up to the roof where she might find the object. Her hands held tightly to a bag of her daughter’s hair. The child had died in one of the rooms, and the mother seemed to be bringing her hair to the object. None of us are quite sure what she had planned to do when she reached the roof. The security force was on her in seconds, just as her eyes settled on it. The glass and the screws tore into the flesh of her arms and the meat of the muscles on her back. She never stopped screaming, nor clutching the bag of hair.
The force swarmed her, but she had already seen, so the effort was in vain. She had seen the object, and when she did, her screams became saturated with tears. Yes, she must have hoped that the object, hovering and pulsing above the building, would have taken the bag of hair from her— could have taken the bag into its orbit, or if it were made of some fluid-like matter, could have sucked the hair inside its mass and woven the child’s material within itself. The building has no cemetery, as it has no dirt and only walls with people filling every space between them. Most bodies were burned in the basement. The woman had shaved her daughter’s body before it was taken away by the volunteer mortuary force, hoping to keep a part of it for herself and for the object. Her own body, lying prone at the entrance to the roof, was a pulpy mess when the security forces had finished. Her cries, no more than a series of low gurgles.
It was then that a tongue unfurled from the object, which is a head, and slithered beneath the wreckage of her body, which held the hair. It lifted her from the roof and pulled her back into the hole of its face, which is the mouth. The experts must have known, must have discovered over the course of their experiments, that the object had grown from the building. Or rather, that the building had grown from the object… at some point. Perhaps the experts were afraid to reveal how little they knew about it and feared that no amount of experimentation could reveal its origin story. Knowing nothing, but still clutching the bag that held her daughter’s remains, the woman was swallowed. The rest of us only became aware of the ordeal on the roof as we listened to the sounds of her mangled body bouncing against the walls, down some unseen tunnel that we can now confidently say, is the building’s throat.
