#eide burrows

ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)

In the end, we’re all just shapes. Figures, either soft, angled, flat, or dimensional, all floating through space with only the hint of a purpose. I’ve always thought this made us pitiable. Shapes don’t have a purpose, their only use is to simply be. What is the meaning of a triangle? Any color, it doesn’t matter. How about a square? A dodecahedron? Exactly. It has no right to have that many sides all to itself, but it exists simply because we willed it into being. Shapes thinking of shapes.

Lines connect shapes and connect people. We have no reason to be, other than to just… exist. We think of shapes. Who thought of us? God, you could argue and many do. Argue about God, argue with God, argue in defense of God, argue against God. Argue, argue, argue. Just shapes arguing with shapes.

For the longest time, as far as I was concerned, Millport was nothing but shapes. Old buildings with new paint, old billboards with flashy new signs, old families run by new blood. Old ways and new people. They tried to cover up the old, and bury it like bones in a landfill. Cover it up along with the potholes with new asphalt and cement. Make it shiny and new. They still crack, anyway.

Hundreds of years, that town stood sturdy on soft ground. Founded by confident men with high hopes, big dreams, bigger egos, and empty pockets. Dreams make you blind, but people like to invest in them. Dreams give shapes a purpose, don’t they? Confidence fools others, and eventually fools yourself. Have you ever gone unnoticed in a place you’re not meant to be? If you walk with your head held high and false arrogance, people will believe you belong with them. For either to believe this façade makes them a fool. Not that anyone really belongs anywhere, and we’re all just foolish enough to believe it. Foolish shapes believing other foolish shapes.

I’ve always reckoned that it’s easier to be confident on uncertain legs than to fear falling on steady ground. Watching a frightened child stepping along a wide, even plank at the park is more likely to fall than a tightrope walker on a flimsy wire. Tightrope walkers are triangles, balanced and perfect. Children are parallelograms. Misshapen. Lopsided.

All the children in Millport are parallelograms. Some are flat and one dimensional, others forever rotating on an axis to show off their sides. Never the same for more than a day- I kept track. The adults were a variety of evolved and ever-changing polygons. But for some reason when I was little, looking at all these shapes going about their pretend lives, I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t a polygon when the world seemed to be filled with them. When I looked at my skin, it was soft and squished under touch. My hair was coarse, dull, and brown, unlike my mothers which was static with energy and never quite the same after you blinked. My face was asymmetrical too, as many shapes are. Eyes that seemed to be too big, ears that poke out a bit too much, bags that never went away… well, I don’t think they did anyways. You have to understand, it’s been a while since I’ve seen it. After a childhood of feeling as though the world hadn’t been fair enough to make me a nice red square, I just accepted it. I learned not to mind my lack of shape, and felt content to be liminal.

The first time I decided to look further into what made the town fit together into the odd puzzle it was, was the Masonic Lodge on the empty lot of Seymour and Drummond. It was always changing, not that it mattered enough to give it a second thought. In the morning, it could be a red trapezoid but by noon it would shift into a cracked yellow octagon. Personally I always preferred the trapezoid. The men who entered in the evening but never seemed to exit in the morning were also known to change. Whether by name, appearance, age, or multitude… who went in did not dictate who went home. Not that anyone cared about that, either.

When I was feeling especially curious, I would watch them enter from the dim car park away from a flickering old street lamp. As nights went by and I felt brave enough to stand directly under it, I found it made no difference as they never even looked at my direction. By the morning, the cars would be gone and the men allegedly returned home to their spouses and families. And I would leave, deciding to return again at the next meeting whenever I felt the disturbing pull in my stomach beckoning me to witness it. The scheduled days varied, but was always twice a week starting at 8:12 pm and ending when the street light flickered, shrouding the building and parked vehicles in darkness, then flickering on again to show an empty lot. They never met on Tuesdays.

My mother worked down the street at the Birdie’s Bed & Breakfast to help Bertha Goodwin when the old woman needed assistance navigating the cottage she’d rented her whole life, it seemed like. Bertha, though we always called her Birdie, was in her late seventies when I was born, and she was in her late seventies when I left for college. She was still in her late seventies when I returned home the next fall with nothing to show for it and a mother who didn’t even acknowledge I had gone in the first place. Not that they even noticed when I was living with them as a child either. When they deemed me old enough to care for myself, Mum would leave in the mornings with a freshly ironed apron, cleaning supplies I never saw opened, and my Dad would leave to work on blueprints of buildings I never saw built. After staring at my ceiling for hours, distracting myself with faded stars stuck up with putty and cracks in the walls, I would leave my blue square of a house and wander the streets looking for a clue to a mystery I wasn’t quite sure existed.

I tried to be academic, I really did. I wanted to leave that old town and its jagged shapes and build something for myself, but the longer I spent away the pit in my stomach grew more and even looking in the mirror hurt my eyes. I couldn’t feel the softness of my skin anymore. It felt like plastic. The faces of my classmates were static and boring-- none of them pulsed with the same energy as the people back home and all sounded the same. After barely a year I couldn’t take it and moved back home. The school didn’t even call to finalize my resignation.

As a child who grew up with strange disappearances monthly (Birdie said Misses Morgan moved to the States, but her car still collected leaves in the drive), stores popping up that never seemed to stay, and the absence of new neighbors, nothing was too out of the ordinary for us. But I’ve read some of the other statements, Jon, and it seems nothing was quite ordinary at all. Construction workers would vanish and it would rarely make the papers. The opening of a new chip shop was a blessing, but no one would ever be able to go more than twice before it was on its way out of town and replaced with some new fad.

Until the year the cemetery flooded and the school gymnasium roof caved in, about 2006 (it’s hard to beep track of the years), I didn’t think extraordinary could exist. Or at least not in any way that mattered. That was the year the Abbott’s moved in to the house on Cowley Lane, a house I had only ever seen out of the corner of my eye. On a street filled with shapes, this was a straight line.

They arrived as most families do, escaping an unpleasant moment in time by “starting fresh” and “turning over a new leaf”. I never quite understood that expression, as turning over a new leaf does not negate the old one. By turning over a leaf with a sullied edge to admire the green underside, it still remains the same leaf. Turning over a new leaf simply means the old one is left to decompose while you find a crisp, untarnished leaf, while the other still has a perfectly acceptable side to be admired. And, as most families do, they leave the unsightly leaf to be buried with the hundreds of others they’ve “turned over” and promise to change. The promises stay, but are never quite redeemed. Sorry, I got carried away… it's hard to find things to be passionate about these days. I'll continue.

The Abbotts integrated as well as they could, two children ready to attend school no matter the construction work in the gym or the fact it was well into November, and a third to stay at home as infants are wont to do. They threw a barbecue to get to know the neighbors, and the whole village attended bringing their own family recipes and baked desserts. I stayed home.

The Abbott's father, Mark, gained a quick job as an iron-worker while his wife (I never knew her name) stayed indoors looking after the baby. I’d see him in the mine, hacking away at rusty cars and rail too old to use and loading the scraps to be taken away. Hours, I’d watch, as he compressed the piles and laid the new framework to keep unwanted visitors from being crushed to death by eroding stone walls. The day he was called to help install the new wrought iron fence where the cemetery flooded and washed away, I followed him there too. Wherever he went, the shapes that once filled the town lost their vibrancy. Instead of fluctuating between tetrahedrons and prisms, they became either stagnant or frantic. Everything at once, or nothing at all.

I watched him dig in the downtrodden soil, unearthing rectangular caskets and hexagonal coffins. The rain that year had brought landslides and sinkholes, most destructive in the cemetery just outside town and disturbing the dead where they slept. Headstones, monuments, and mementos washed away and sank into the soft dirt, the running fence encircling the land broken up and dragged along with it. Once an infinite circle that cut the burial grounds off from the rest of the puzzle, the shape was now distorted and wrong. Without gate to close and make it whole again, I felt the muted shape of the cemetery slip away and become a tangled mess of string.

He dug for hours until the orange circle of a sun lowered itself behind the branches of the forest and their quickly disappearing leaves. Moving from one plot to the other, from the pristine headstones of recent years down to the protruding stones with names barely legible beneath the moss and decades of wear. Digging, digging, digging, all the while the formless fence to-be remained untouched. When the sky turned dark and snow clouds threatened to shed their weight, I finally turned my back on Mark and left him alone with the dead for the first time all evening, the man seeming blissfully unaware he hadn’t been alone in the first place at all.

The next morning when I went to check on his new project, the buildings along the way had lost their shape. No longer were streets lined with sturdy trapezoids, rectangles, and prisms. The colors were off, like a child with a crayon who had not yet learned the concept of limitation. They bled into each other and polluted the air, cracked frames unable to hold them back. The air tasted like static and I couldn't feel the ground beneath my boots.

By the time I got to the clearing, the holes had been filled and the new fence had taken shape in towering columns that crawled and stretched like spider webs across the dying grass. It was the same dirt, the same stone, trees, and air, but it did not feel like the cemetery I had watched be torn away the night before. I felt a chill settle in my bones and leave as quickly as it came like waiting for pain after burning your finger on a hot mug. From all my observing of the town, never once has a feeling ever driven me to run far away until what I was seeing before me was but an afterthought.

I passed by the Abbotts house, static growing stronger until I could barely hear the crunch of leaves or gravel beneath my feet. Only the wife's car was in the drive and a fresh coat of snow indicated there had only been the one all night, and the black pick-up Mark drove was nowhere to be seen. The sign on their door was new, barely two months old, but as I looked at it, truly looked at it, did it appear to have aged to rot. Abbott’s House it said in curvy lettering (with all the determination of a line pretending to be something it’s not) with five handprints beneath for each family member. Five. Mother, three kids, and… now four. The longer I thought about it, the longer I stared, trying to blink away the dots that kept getting in the way of my vision, the more my eyes convinced me there had always been four. Never two cars, never five hands. Through my haze, I barely felt my feet take me home. Even when I layed down to rest in a foreign looking room, I decided that my childhood mystery, a fantasy I had grown to accept, had found another clue and a little bit more of the town chipped away. Mark didn’t show up for work anymore.

Little things were changing, it just took a trained eye to notice. You don’t have to be a detective to see the details, sometimes you just have to be very, very afraid. The sign for Birdies Bed & Breakfast was now spelled with a ‘y’ instead of an ‘i’, and the apron my mother wore was now a faded lilac instead of a robin’s egg blue. The oak tree that stood tall in our backyard, old as the town itself with a slow swinging hammock tied to the branches, was now a young birch. I likened it to two puzzles cut from the same machine. Different pictures with pieces that fit together only in the most literal sense. The longer I noticed, the more I wondered which puzzle was truly mine, and which one was slowly being replaced.

Each morning the static filled my nose, irritated my eyes, and clouded my ears with a soft dizzying hum that slowly drowned out my senses. The shapes that made up my entire world were broken, dull, and chipping away until everything I knew was muddled and loud.

It was only when I woke up in an empty room, no posters, cardboard boxes, or dirty clothes, I found my feet barely touched the floor. I felt weightless as I wandered down to the kitchen where Mum usually got ready, feeling as though the back of my eyes were filled with cotton. There were only two seats sat at the dining table, and when I tried to open my mouth to speak my tongue tasted like ash.

Before I could blink or even cry, suddenly I was in the street. Red shapes filled my periphery and everything between, and the town was gone. A red sky bled into the houses, cars, and potholes cremating them like the dead. I felt myself falling away from my body and I finally saw my shape. It was a shifting mass of angles and colors and somehow I just knew it was me. When I finally did cry, smaller shapes fell from her eyes copying the drops that fell from mine. Was it out of malice? Pity? Understanding? Was she crying because she shared my pain or was she just a cheap reflection of who I thought I was or simply longed to be?

It’s been a while since I’ve been here, in this black and red. She still mocks me. Radiant and pulsing with color while I exist with imitation soft skin and coarse hair. They’re the only things I can be sure of, as I haven’t seen my face in a long time. Only hers. Now I’m not sure who she is, but she’s the only company in this void. Until I saw your shape, Jon. Blue and black polygons blinking between colors with the beat of a foreign heart. You lead me here to a library of pain that reflected my own, a reprieve from the emptiness I’ve been floating in. Maybe if I tell you my story you can bring me back to the shape of your world? I suppose only time will tell, and I have an eternity to wait.