Way down below, down underground, there is a single room. The walls are dull and gray. There are no doors, no windows. There are sheets of metal bent at right angles affixed to all the corners of the room and outlines of the floor and ceiling. The floor is the same as the walls. It is a perfect cube.
On the floor, (or is it the wall) crouched, wearing all white, is a girl. She is shivering and has dark circles under her eyes. Looking up from below, she sees the wall. She forces herself to pretend that it's a good wall. "My, what a lovely wall," she says. But that wall, she's seen it a billion boring times, and it just happens to be identical to every other wall in the room. It is identical to the floor she just finished looking at.
She took a white sock off of her foot and placed it next to this wall. She wanted a way to recognize it from the others. She ripped her other sock to pieces, and placed it next to the wall directly to the right of the first wall. Then she returned to the middle of the room and sat. She smiled. One wall was a whole sock. One wall was a torn sock. The two walls behind her, she saved for later. Besides, she only had two socks.
2003