When Stone Asked for a Statement

On a New York street the narrator stops before a bank façade with a stone pediment full of ageless figures, columns that seem to await a verdict, a green light and a man at the door looking at his phone, when one of the statues turns and asks whether he is an architect. He leans a ladder of imagination against the front, and the statue climbs down barefoot, shedding a year at every rung, then walks inside unnoticed to ask the clerk for a statement in the name of the hand that carved it. The name is not on file, so the statue lays a small chisel on the counter as its maker's signature and shows the marks of his life: a misplaced blow struck when his hand trembled with hunger, and a fold of the robe finished after his child fell asleep. Asked for an account number, it falls silent and fine dust escapes its mouth, and the narrator remembers the façades he has signed without naming the hands that built them. Outside, the statue recognizes the weariness of a worker on the scaffolding and returns to its place facing him, while the narrator writes the worker's name beneath his sketch and that night shows his son the name before the building.