By the time the tenth station went up, the gallery had shut off the overhead track at my request, and the room I had worked in for seven months finally looked the way it had always looked at four in the morning inside my head.
June 30th. The last piece is a beam near the ceiling with thirty-one cords hanging straight down from it, cut to uneven lengths, each ending in a plug or a socket at some height between the shoulder and the knee. There is no pattern. I attempted three and abandoned all three. The light comes from one low source at the front, so the cords are lit along their length while the room behind them collapses into brown and black, and the concrete takes a soft grey wash and holds nothing at all.
The city collected the rest of it on the seventeenth. Not out of malice. The permit was for the storefront, the storefront reverted, and two men with a truck did in forty minutes what had taken me seven months. I watched from across the street and did not stop them, because they were doing the work I used to do, and doing it well.
Thirty-one cords remain. Every one of them ends. Not one of them begins. That is the last thing The Chapel of Dead Extension Cords has to say, and I would rather it were said in the dark. Omnia extrema, nullus fons.
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