qarrtsiluni

The fetchingly lithe and charmingly disheveled Ms. Tetley-Pringle was well into the third hour of her daily asanas when truth called down to her like a thunderclap:

A clock has a floor and a ceiling and four walls. A clock also has a window. Some, but not all, clocks have doors.

A telephone, not unlike a clock, has four walls, a floor and a ceiling. All telephones also have doors. Some, but not all, telephones have windows.

She forgot her 13th or 14th Downward Facing Dog of the day and hit the sticky mat belly first. In considerable pain she considered her prosthetic limb. She preferred the old-fashioned wooden sort to the lighter and infinitely more wieldy synthetic variety, believing this choice gave her practice a better chance of finally attaining true liberation.

Ms. Tetley-Pringle tried again to empty her mind but found herself considering the startling similarities among disparate objects such as prosthetic limbs, bowls of breakfast cereal, and the books of the Old Testament. She now understood with utter clarity that all have four walls, windows, a floor and a ceiling. Each also has a door. And one day one of these doors will open into a post office and a young man with snow on his shoulders will rush up to a clerk, with an urgency he never knew he was capable of and shout, “My grandmother has broken her hip. You must go to her at once!”

by Peter Cherches and Holly Anderson

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For process notes, see “Found Photo.”