In an old and lonely forest, far away from almost everything, sat a curious dwelling.
At the base of a grove of massive trees was a small, square building made of brick, overtaken by ivy and moss. Who it belonged to was anyone’s guess, but from the looks of it, it had been abandoned long ago. It wasn’t until a man named Giovanni Lawson (who wasn’t actually a man at all) came across it while making his way through the forest that it was remembered with any purpose.
He stood in front of his strange find, listening as the birds sang in the branches high above. “What’s this?” he asked. “Where did you come from?”
He went inside, passing carefully through the door hanging off its hinges. The windows were shattered. Grass and weeds grew up through the warped wooden floor. The roof had partially collapsed, and the sun shone through on a pile of leaves that almost reached the ceiling. At the top of the leaf pile, a golden flower had bloomed, stretching toward the sunlight streaming through the exposed rafters.
“It’s perfect,” he said aloud, although he was very much alone. “Yes, this will do just fine. How strange. How wonderful.”
Giovanni returned bright and early the next morning, his sleeves pushed up his forearms. He knocked down the walls inside the solitary building to create one large room, carrying plaster and wood out piece by piece and piling them on the forest floor. By the time he finished, his face and hair were coated with dust and his joints creaked and groaned, but he was satisfied. There was merit to hard work.
“There,” he said to the birds in the trees as he wiped his face. “Much better. A first step to a new beginning.”
The little building soon became a home for all manner of things: sheets of metal and lengths of wires and cords, batteries of all shapes and sizes, circuit boards and microchips in glass mason jars. Other jars held hundreds of seeds of various shapes, sizes, and colors. There were old music boxes that sang little songs that ached, and silent record players without any records. Televisions, both great and small, their screens dark. And books! So many books on a variety of topics from plant life to whaling, from animals of the forest to complex diagrams of nuclear cores. They lined the new floor-to-ceiling shelving he’d made from the remains of what he’d torn down. It wasn’t until he placed the last book on the last shelf that he realized he himself had nowhere to stay. The room was too full.