Hammers and Nails

If walls could talk, I would tell you that, unlike children, I am put together without a heart or mind or soul. They begin with my bones; two by fours and two by sixes nailed together and covered in a rough but easily penetrable skin they called drywall. The clothes they put me in was a plain white gown of paint and a lining of flat baseboards. My brothers and sisters were put together in much the same way, but some of them were closed off to me when they sealed the other rooms off from us. I got to see them from time to time when they put in a door in my sibling. We were able to see things out of a glass box they cut out ahead of me. The sights were less than colorful with the only thing visible was a cinderblock wall and the smallest of triangles of the roof next door.

When they finished putting us all together, we had to wait for what felt like a century for someone to interact with us again. Sure, we were able to see other people, but they never did anything with us. They just stared at us and talked about us behind our backs. In and out, in and out. People always came and went. There was a brief moment when the same person came around more than once, but it was only to cover me with boxes and block my view of the fence. It was not much of a bad thing, but the piles of boxes did cause me to tumble into a perpetual darkness by blocking out the light from the glass bulb that hung above me. Still, nobody came to talk to us and we waited an even longer time until the boxes were finally taken away and I could see again.

It was another long while before someone came to see us, but one day, someone finally came in to stay. They kept talking about how they were going to decorate me apart from my siblings. One sibling was dressed in fresh pink while the other three of us were painted purple. The boxes of nails that they brought in made me even more nervous. In one of us, the nails were used to hang up a large strip of fabric that covered the glass pane window that we got to look out of, but the cinderblock wall was not going to need to be the highlight of our view anymore. Nails were hammered into the wall where the people hung photos of a weird flesh creature that had a pair of antlers. The other walls we covered in a sticky substance that helped attach a series of rainbows and horned horses I heard called ‘unicorns,’ but it was nothing compared to the small thing that they brough into the room.

It was so tiny and we did not think it would survive in our enclosed space for long. The thing slept in an even smaller enclosed space made of smaller walls that did not have skin like us, and it had such smaller bones than we did. Between the four of us, we found it hard to relate with it and left it alone. The small thing in it had me worried though. The others ignored it, but I could not help but look down on it constantly. It slept in the box of small walls right in front of me and I felt an obligation to look after it. When it screamed at night, it made my nonexistent heart leap into my metaphorical throat and I tried to help it. Unfortunately, all I could do was sit there and stare it until the people came back in to take care of it. On a cold night, the long haired one came in and sat in a chair with the small creature. Putting it up to a pointy hill on their body, surprisingly, got the tiny creature to stop its crying.

This went on for many more days and nights before another small creature came into the room. It was so much smaller than the first one, but acted exactly the same way as the first. The two of them slept in the small walled rooms until they moved those out and brought in something that looked more comfortable and was a lot larger. The small creatures got bigger too and they started to look more and more like the people we were used to seeing. There came a time where the two became smaller versions of our people and they left the room empty.

The colors that were put in, the pinks and the purples, were replaced with the plain white that we were first dressed in. What was covering the window came down, and the window replaced as well as the light that hung from above us. Everything old was becoming new except for us. None of us were replaced and we watched as the process repeated itself. People came to see us, talked about us, filled us with boxes, redecorated us, brought in small creatures for us, take them out, replace, repeat. It led us to think, maybe we would never be replaced and, even a century later, we would still be around being decorated and painted over again and again. The day eventually came when something green came crashing through the ceiling, killing him and two of the four of us. We were sad to see them go, but they were replaced by new ones that looked just like us and I never saw the difference. It made me think that maybe I was not immortal after all. I was beginning to feel old and was jealous of the new walls. They had less holes and fresher bones that did not feel termite ridden, but I guess that was the riddle of all of it. Where do we cross the line between life and death, and what right did I have to live if I did not do anything?