I walked in and, feeling worked up yet listless, seeking security, settled in one child’s chair that looked sturdy enough to hold me. I still wore my overcoat. The sun came out. Yellow lit the wall behind my head. I felt like sleeping, I felt like crying. I felt almost old. My cheek touched chilly white enamel and it was from this low angle that I noticed a blurred image peeking through hard enamel above. Around the fire extinguisher, faintest golden lines. I laughed aloud, I almost thought I heard a child humming.

I rose and backed away and saw it, still fighting to emerge around the glass case. Here it was, now in Santa’s junior elf room. Finding it made me feel far taller, somehow buoyant, giddy. If ever there were a good sign …

I moved forward and pressed both hands to cold paint. I saw how her yellow had bled through coat after coat of institutional enamel. You could still make out legs’ rounded forms. Where her pay phone had once been clamped, they’d placed this glass-fronted fire-douser.

Thighs still formed a strange consoling tent. Though this was a kids’ room, adults had penned up little comments. I was reading when I heard my name behind me.

I turned, said, “Look, you little totem-maker. One of your familiars has outlived us here, you little totem-maker. Is this happy news or what?”

She came forward, still poking a gauze pad into the crook of her right arm. I settled mine around her so we could study it side by side. She said, “Somehow I thought this room was at the other end.”

“But isn’t this great?”

“Great? They painted me out, asswipe.”

“Yeah, but it still shows. You thought maybe they’d frame it? It’s still here, isn’t it? We’ve changed, it hasn’t, and God knows a lot has happened since.” Sun now flooded the wall and little checkmarks from the pin she wore made nervous feathery curves, moving only with her rise and fall of breath. The building seemed far quieter than in the old itchy drippy VD days of our curable glory.

“See what the critics are saying?” I pointed to wiseguys’ jottings. This being a nursery had not restrained them—comments rested above the five-foot level. One ballpoint arrow pointed to the genderless juncture of massed emerging legs: “Will she or won’t she?” Someone else’s red ink had made a dotted pleading little line where one small vagina opened to this huge being. “Best offer I’ve had all day,” she did her Donald Duck voice. The third mark was the work of some kid who’d probably stood on one of these midget chairs. He (or she, but probably he) had added a black blimp shape that swerved off to the right, intending to show an erection, seeming based on one he’d glimpsed. I felt myself, below the belt, quicken to brief life. “Nothing like good reviews.” She half-smiled, fingers tracing the words, her lines. We heard a sound and started. The small head of one dark living child poked out the crenellated window of the cardboard fort.