A little girl roamed the halls of an old Parisian building no one noticed because no one needed its lingering eeriness in their packed skulls suffocating on happy-quick gratification they secretly resented. She stuck her head out from the windows and ran her hands over the grainy walls; it seemed as though ants had been captured in the paint and they painfully scurried underneath. She liked the phantasmagorical feel of it on her fingertips, it seemed more real than the reality she tried to stick to.

             Families had come and gone for over a century in this decrepit place, living and dying as they do. Critics deserving crucifixion and kibitzers speaking to anyone who would listen had resided there too. There was a painter who bled his pain into the paint with a Sisyphean resolution, determined to remain imaginatively depressed. She liked watching his brush strokes as he sat on the top floor looking out of the windows with crosses.

             The crosses came first when the building came into being. They floated in the sky without a frame until architects put one there, followed by golden glass, darkened silver drains, and a roof filled with reveries. Her home had come down from celestial remnants and she would keep trying for existence. She’d keep whispering to be formed by the writer who came and went, who had left her stranded in an idea. She didn’t even have a name, but she giggled as living dolls do trapped in the walls under teeming phantoms of ants building back up to the sky.