The Garden That Summoned Its Residents

A small garden lies between apartment buildings, with white benches curved as though stone had learned tenderness, broad leaves holding the light, balconies stacked above, and nobody in sight. When the narrator, an architect, sits at a table and pulls the opposite chair closer for his bag, the chair asks him to leave it empty because someone might come; it has been waiting since construction ended, while residents praise the place whenever they take a photograph and then go upstairs. He remembers the gardens he drew on paper, the shade he calculated and the words “Project complete” he wrote at handover, as a white bench drags itself toward the entrance to go up to the people, stops at a notice forbidding anyone to move the garden furniture, and asks whether loneliness may be moved outside. A woman comes out with a cup and sits in the garden she has never used, then speaks of a man who put too much sugar in his coffee and left his book open as if he would be back in a minute, until a neighbor on a balcony comes down and a child asks to join them. The building gains no height and no window, yet a woman no longer has to finish her coffee alone, and the architect quietly corrects his report: today the project was completed.