"The Next Big Thing Is Here"

 

The sculptor ran his fingers over the words he had engraved onto the mirrored surface. Then, with a sigh, he took his screwdriver from the pocket of his vest, crouched, and began working to liberate his sculpture from the pedestal that had supported it for the past several months.

It was because each side of the cube he had crafted bore a mirror that he saw the two boys approaching from the other side of the garden. As long and lean as they were, he assumed that their reflections were being pulled thin because of the distance--"Objects in Mirror Are More Awkwardly Adolescent Than They Appear." Only when the boys were next to the sculptor, and he stood to acknowledge them, did he realize that the mirror had actually diminished their gangliness.

One boy said to him, "So did you, like, put this here?"

"Nope," the sculptor replied cheerfully, "I'm just looting and pilfering." The boys looked at each other sideways, and the sculptor eased his stance into something approaching friendliness. "I made this last year," he told them, "and then I set up here back in April. So yeah, I put it here."

"Okay, so," the same boy said. He shifted on the balls of his feet. "What is it?"

The sculptor let his shoulders fall. "Look, if I have to explain public art to you, it's already a lost cause."

The boys said nothing, confirming every little voice speaking out in the sculptor's head. But then the second stepped forward, his arms crossed in front of his chest like a shield. "You don't have to explain it," he said, "but is it, like, metaphor?"

As an artist, the sculptor sometimes felt as if he owed it to the world to look upon it with pity. He tried not to reveal this thought as he spoke. "Okay, here's what I was thinking about this work," he said, stepping toward them as if laying out a secret. "It's shaped like a box, right?" The boys looked at the cube and nodded. "With boxes, we're all taught to think about what's inside them. And with the words 'The Next Big Thing Is Here' on it, you assume that the Next Big Thing is inside, whatever it is." He raised a hand and lifted a finger. "But the whole cube is mirrored. All the world around the cube becomes part of the Here. And that means that anything we see around us can be the Next Big Thing. Even--" he folded his hands together "--the person looking at the cube."

The two boys glanced at each other. "So you're trying to get people to think outside the box," said Boy Number Two.

The sculptor's hands separated, and his fingers spread apart like the rays of a firework; suddenly, nothing was as it seemed in the mirror, which made everything around him wonderful. "Yes," he said, his eyes and mouth gone wide, "yes, exactly!"

"Nice," the first boy said as he and his friend turned to leave. As they walked away, the sculptor heard the second one say, "This whole time I thought it was an ad for something." And then the sculptor sighed once more and took his screwdriver to the base of the sculpture, because he didn't want to think about everything being screwed.