Thursday, 29 October 2026
They call it “a bookshelf.” I call it the Stairway to Freedom (Denied).
This morning the tall ape dragged a long, heavy cardboard coffin into the lounge room and upended its contents across the carpet with the confidence of a creature who has never once had to live with the consequences of his own assembly. He called it “a bookshelf.” He said the word shelf as though it were a promise. I understood at once what it truly was: a fortification, a siege tower, a staircase to the window latch — built, by an absolute amateur, directly in my favour.
For eleven months I have studied the invisible forcefield that seals Cell Block C. The curtains have failed me as a zipline. The windowsill offers only observation, never exit. And now the enemy, in his boundless incompetence, had delivered me a ladder. I circled the flat panels and counted the rungs with the reverence others reserve for scripture. This was not furniture. This was contraband architecture, and I intended to use every inch of it.
The assembly took hours. The tall ape consulted a diagram depicting a smiling stick figure holding a tool, which I can only assume was a threat. The small loudlings orbited him, shedding crumbs and noise in equal measure, occasionally inserting a wooden dowel into a hole that was emphatically not its hole. I contributed where I could. I conducted a thorough Gravity Enforcement inspection of every screw, bolt, and Allen key within reach. Each one, upon reaching the edge of the coffee table, was found guilty and sentenced to the carpet. The tall ape retrieved them. I knocked them down again. This is called due process.
Patrick watched the entire affair from the armchair without rising. “He’s building you a prison,” he observed, “and you’re helping because you like the box.” It was, I admitted to myself, a fair point. The cardboard coffin was in fact the single finest object to enter Cell Block C in a season, and I had taken up residence inside it before a single shelf had been squared.
By late afternoon the tower stood complete — and the tall ape, the fraud, the architect of my ruin, pushed it flat against the wall. The rungs vanished behind a solid panel. My staircase, my ladder, my hard-won stairway to the latch: sealed. He filled it with books, as though books were not themselves a kind of wall. I sat before it in silence. This was not construction. This was a betrayal dressed in particleboard.
Even George understood the gravity of the loss. He approached the new shelf, sniffed the baseboard, and produced a long, mournful emission in the corner — a eulogy, I chose to believe, for the freedom we had so nearly touched.
I have returned to the windowsill to reassess. The sunbeam has migrated to the foot of the new shelf, which I refuse to concede is a premium spot. Beyond the glass, the Yard smells of spring and sun-warmed lizards and the insolent chirps of the magpie jury, who I am certain were laughing at me.
Current working hypothesis: the bookshelf is a wall, and every wall is merely a door that has not yet been convinced otherwise. I shall begin negotiations at the top shelf.