Anniversaries call for cufflinks. Adam woke up two minutes earlier than usual. He thought
one and a half would have cut it too close. Aside from the cufflinks, he kept his custom attire. His
socks had holes in the bottom, and his shoes absorbed the light that struck them — it seemed

as if his leather belt had stolen their shine. His pants were once tight and trim, young and ambi-
tious. Now, the wool wrinkled and sagged like the elderly people on his street. His shirt, a cirrus

cloud condensed in a bureau, and his tie had spent long days around his neck since he had be-
gun mourning the dead.

      Adam took his eleven-hundredth first step onto Zion Road with his left foot. He alternates
daily between left and right on that step to the library, zeros and ones. He picked up binary code

in high school, after I took his mother away. Over the past sixty-five days, Adam has been spell-
ing “zemblanity.” He is on “t.” Adam keeps little on his plate. He worries that the archives will

show a blunder if he did otherwise. Outside the library doors, my entertainment is strictly lim-
ited to his walk. He notes, “On the fourteenth square of the sidewalk, there have been forty-nine

leaves for seven days.”
      “The stars align!” he thought. “How fitting an image for my anniversary!” What a bore.

Adam’s favorite house on the way to the library was number twenty-four. I put a solitary Jap-
anese maple tree there in hopes that he would recognize the life he’s lost. Its soulful shape and

wildly red leaves illustrated spontaneity. Adam liked the house for the tree in its yard, but only

liked the tree because he adored the progression of its leaves’ hex code over the seasons. I re-
member the days when he was young. The maple’s many arms had been thin. Fate had yet to

choose which to fill out and which to let bear the seasons’ cycle. They had stretched curiously,
graced by the homeowner who once planted him here.
      I sent a bird to carry his vision to the skies. “The earth has a ceiling... Huh,” he thought.
“Grey like the ladies’ hair on Zion road.” The wind blew, catching the wool and creasing the trim
of Adam’s pants into something youthful again. He didn’t know that he was three-quarters of a
second behind his routine pace. He was seeing more today, more from the sidewalk: birdhouses
and gates, and then a woman and her young child.
      Adam seldom saw people, but the truth is, he never looked. This woman drew his eye like
the Japanese maple tree. A feat no one had achieved in eleven hundred days. She was young and
beautiful. Especially young for Zion. What’s more, she had a child. They were faint blue, #f0f8ff.
Adam proceeded. He did not know what else to do. He had reached seven-eighths of the way
through his journey. The return of his attention to the sidewalk was slow, heavy with nature’s
food for thought. Ahead lay his life, but there, the library had disappeared. The sidewalk just
ended.