The Wall

She stared about the carriage house, sniffing in the slightly bitter odor of the curled shavings that littered the floor and the benches, glancing at the tools raked and ranged across the walls, hanging from the rafters. Saws and chisels and clamps and drills. All hand tools, of course, in those days.

"And all the better for it," he would say, being suited to the age.

Later, while he was bathing himself free of the day's wood-dust, soaking in the tub, she spent ages looking at it and giving the people and parrots names.

"I name thee Morgan," she said. "And thee, Ivor. And thee, Sanjay. And thee Bronwen X, and thee Mifanwy, and thee Mrs. Sedge."

And on and on and on, using up all the names she liked or stood for someone she knew until she ran out and thought of him just out of the bath and drying himself, naked on the mat, and went across the yard then, enjoying the warm late spring air and her already prickling skin from the thought of what was to come. Remembering the little people in Ivor's world and forecasting the way he would slide her dress up and over her head and then run his hands across her skin, lingering where he wanted.

"The interesting parts," he would say.

"What am I then, a collection of bits and pieces, some better than others?" she would ask.

And they would end up like one of Ivor's couples. She knew exactly which couple she wanted, after naming the characters of his latest world.

"Then that's how we shall today, like Sanjay and Mifanwy," she said to herself, and went to find the damp and hungering Ivor.

Was it just after then that the dreadful happened? In later years, Morgan tried to reconstruct the exact timeline using the birth of that new and joyous world of little people as a marker, but there was a clouding of perception or an unwillingness of memory to deliver the exact time and date, the local point in history at which that world and the great world which contained it, and the world of Morgan and Ivor, collapsed. Those worlds, all fitted inside the other, all shriveled and all made dead.

It was definitely later, but not much, in spring, after the sculpture was unveiled again, in public, at the crossroads where Traffic Lane met High Street, this time with a real drum roll provided by two boys from the class Ivor taught who had made musical instruments from reclaimed materials, two big old yeasty-smelling beer barrels, and were doing such a good loud thundery job that the Mayor, Mr. Pommytam, standing too close, put his hands on his ears and grinned.

There were plenty of oohs and aahs, out loud this time, and a whole line of people waiting in a queue to look inside. Morgan stood and watched them lower their heads and turn them a bit from side to side as they surveyed the inner world, wondering if any would object to the couples imitating Ivor and her at their intimacy, and no one did. They wouldn't know, would they, though they might guess, from exactly what source he took his model behaviors, but Morgan caught the eye of Mrs. Trethewey as she rose from her inspection and thought she saw a glint of amusement, or perhaps desire, or remembrance of things past, or a forecast of things to come, in her gentle wink.

That wink seemed to Morgan a good omen. After all those years of tumbled and narrow history some of the old strictures, rules of the now banished Family of Man, may have finally been washed or leached out of people's minds, even the older ones, and been flushed away and replaced by the joy of living free. Maybe.