The Wall

The wall behind the elementary school is taller than the school. A boy tells you it began as a planter. Someone added a row of cubes for strawberries and someone a row for marigolds, and then it went up, because cubes stack. Bees go in and out of it. A long ladder leans against the side.

The boy has a laundry basket on his hip and a composition book open on the rim. He lifts out a cube with both hands and fits it into a gap. I know mine by the corners, he says, and points. That one. That one. That one.

Some cubes have a lamp built into them, not yet lit.

A man stands in the street with a duffel bag and a cardboard tube at his feet. He is looking at the top of the wall. He draws two arcs in a notebook with a compass, one across the other, and between them is the shape of a leaf. He looks up again.

The top row is new, the boy says. Nobody I know folded it. It wasn't that high the last time I counted. In the street the man closes his compass and shoulders the bag.