The Unmapping

by Denise S. Robbins

Arjun finds the building easily. Esme has complained about its ugliness, saying it looks like a concrete beehive. Arjun wouldn’t call it a beehive, more of a termite mound, with all those balconies dotting a mass of concrete, which he wouldn’t call ugly unless he had a particular fear of termites, but for him it’s the fact that the building is so huge, so very tall, that makes it look unnatural. After a building reaches a certain height, there are no reference points for measuring it. Nothing to compare it to. It would not be possible for Arjun to know that, for instance, it is about half as tall as the Empire State Building, or the fact that it’s the height of twenty tall tamarind trees stacked atop each other, like the ones outside his grandfather’s apartment. Tall is tall and the top is in the sky. It’s the only skyscraper in a three-block radius.