The incarnadine brick building is crumbling. It is a Costco cake, dried out, drooling the dust of concrete that falls from these buildings into dank pieces of earth that are abandoned by the god who sifts through the world and brings movement to the things we love.

Freddy stares at it each morning during the commute, and each day he has a dark craving to go and live there. When there are no clouds covering her arrival, the sun is blinding on this section of highway, but Freddy never notices. It’s as if that god who is too fearful to go on the land of the cherry, dark red brick building is driving Freddy’s car because he, Freddy, intuitively slows down, knowing chickenshits are slowing down, trying to behave politely and avoiding glomming on to the rubbery skin of the car in front in his aggravation. Those who drive most slowly are the ones who have the expensive shades and who have the new fangled anti-crash systems aboard their silvery Mercedes..

The sunny days create the contrast when Freddy stares through all of the windows that seem to be holes through the entire building as the powerful peach shines through. The peach and the dark red brick create the furnace of a volcano about to blow, full of the abominable life which springs forth like a May tulip after being vacated by god and the chills of winter.

There is a sign on the building which does not pollute too dramatically, and it tells you to call if you’d like to buy the classic boiler building. The sign is frail like a 4-year-old with pneumonia, trying to fight the drunken bastards from the 1930’s.

On the cloudy days, the power of those old, drunk spirits comes out loudly. Then it is the purple of the day fighting with tight fists against the insides of the boiler building, working to carve through the middle of that building from one end to the other, from one blown-out hole to another, holes that barely resemble what were designed as windows. There are very few windows and this may be why the men inside are so restless, so stuck in this world that will never catch up to their deaths, and the purple contrasts with the red that says if that god had stayed here, the death would have been so comprehensively peaceful. Finally, in the plague of the spirit of the unemployment of the 30’s, the battle shows men holding bottles, stumbling with alacrity, being shelled by black metal explosions from giant cannons that are anchored against the inside walls, far, the cannons, from Freddy’s sight.

The piece of fruit that drives Freddy to live there is the two sets of pairs of sandy brown doors that have the arched shape and might open like barn doors, egresses that are on the outside of the building, leading nowhere but to oceans of puff, one in the middle on the seventh floor, and one slightly off-center on the right on the fifth floor. Freddy can feel the drunks pounding on the doors, longing to stroll through and plummet, thinking, the drunks thinking, that the plunge would be enough to terminate their relationships with eternal boiler building hell, only lightened by a sign that supposes itself to bring hope.

There is density of difficulties caused by the fire escape stairs that come from the building starting on the fourth floor and going down. There are no doors or windows either near or above these orphaned metal stairs, clanky metal that was originally painted in permanently-baked black paint but now, with not much age, are polluted and weakened and suffering from the dysthymia of orange rust, rust that is just like the rust that sits all around Freddy’s brain and laughs at him during the futility of his days. It’s these fire escapes that pull Freddy from the wastelands of his abject uselessness as he studies them and imagines getting a Master’s degree in the science of outdoor fire escapes. Freddy understands why fire escapes are on the inside now, why they are encased by construction that might keep humans safe, but he finds himself longing for a day in the near-future when architects begin again to put the fire escapes on the outsides of buildings so that humans can be truly tortured to the maximum amount when that fire breaks out or that tornado sucks out the inside of the building, leaving nothing but a terribly clanky, fearful dance down these stairs that should surely fall into solid, unmovable oak trees. It’s when the stairs are on the outside that Freddy is able to love the fragility of life.