“This one has a flaw,” said the clerk. She displayed the frame for inspection.
“I don’t see it.”
“It’s small. That’s why it’s marked down.”
Despite her warning, I bought the moving sand picture at the Denver Museum of Art gift shop when, for a moment, the trickling grains squeezing between bubbles at the frame’s top and settling to the bottom into layered and shadowed hills lifted my spirits.
Whimsy costs only $160, at a discount.
Two weeks later, on a Tuesday, my sixteenth yearly performance review at work came up short again. “Not everyone is managerial material,” my boss said as he handed me the promotion list.
My former apprentice, Sweeney Jameson didn’t look my way as she boxed belongings at her desk. Her promotion came with an office, and a door she could close, and a window.
Windows are important for me. When I rented my apartment a year earlier, the show unit’s window on the top floor overlooked Confluence Park and Elitch Gardens. The setting sun smoothed Denver’s skyline into buttery yellows and reflected glisters. I didn’t see the apartment they gave me until the day I moved in. Its second-story view faced a building’s backside thirty feet away across the alley above the dumpsters.
So, windows aren’t everything.
Like every apartment I’d rented, I knew I’d just wait out the lease and move again. I hardly ever stayed long enough to decorate the walls.
With the promotion list folded in my back pocket, I took the sand picture from the closet then hung it in the living room, opposite of the window so whatever natural light showed it best. The mounting hardware let me spin the frame. Settled sand rotated to the top, streamed between bubbles like multiple hour glasses, creating the image below. Black sand fell faster than white. A sprinkling of gold swirled after the rest. In a few minutes, the water between the glass plates cleared, leaving a deserty landscape, like something from the American southwest or Arabia, a place for rattlesnake or adders, and lonely winds that whisked sand away in a whisper. Behind the hills, the artist painted a huge moon among translucent clouds. I studied the scene while the shadows on the walls shifted, until the room grew dark.