Once there was a time. That’s it. Once there was time. Frank repeated the words. He liked the patterns of words and repeated them softly as he worked.

The tiny bits of glass stuck neatly on the cardboard, one piece after the other, he placed them carefully—trails of green, amber, clear, an occasional, rare cobalt blue—winding outward, radiating back. He stopped a moment to admire his work. In the firelight, the bits of glass twinkled warmly.

Outside, there was the static of a two-way radio. The small pieces of wood crackled under the flame.

Nalewajek woke up that morning with a rotten headache. He drank his coffee in his bathrobe and after letting Sandy’s Scottish Terrier outside in the yard he turned on the 12 o’clock news.

That night down at the precinct the guys were all in a somber mood. Nalewajek had come in a few minutes late, due to a flat tire. There seemed to be some talk going around about another wage freeze. But Nalewajek had long ago learned to take these things in stride. No sense getting worked up. He did what he was supposed to do. Just like the day he became a cop. Like his father. Like his uncles.

It is dark out now, sometime before midnight. Above the old Buffalo Central Terminal, stars litter the November sky. Inside, Frank is warming his hands over the fire. The warmth eases the stiffness in his hands.

He is wondering if it’s true that we will always know the body as a one way journey: from rosy babyhood to the grave. It all circled back in the end, didn’t it?

At first Frank, doesn’t hear the footsteps outside or see the light pass over the windows above. In the darkened cove beside an old, abandoned ticket booth, he is momentarily lost in a sea of shimmering whorls—blinking diamonds that shine and swirl. Somehow rattling the darkness.

For nearly a month now, he’d been working. Gathering materials by daylight —collecting the old bottles and bits and shards of discarded glass from around the perimeter of the train station, in the gravel and surrounding fields—an old coffee can as a container; cardboard from an empty shipping box; carpenters glue taken from an unlocked garage. Always beginning his work in the late afternoon when the rest of the city began it’s trudge home from the offices and factories, or wherever its people spent their days making money. Money they surrounded themselves with, sometimes. Sometimes gave away. Sometimes had strangely taken away if they veered too far off the designated tracks.

Frank’s needs were simple. True, there had been a time when this wasn’t always so. But no longer was he that same Volvo-driving Associate Professor of Economics who one snowy day in January let his mind boil over as he stood naked atop the radiator reciting spontaneous poetry to a classroom of bewildered students. Nope. He’d bought his ticket home.

The heavy hinges of the door screech and echo, quickly sending Frank into the shadows. Face the wall and they won’t catch the light in your eyes.

“Fucking Picasso.” Nalewajek shakes his head. Kagel wouldn’t know a Picasso if it reached out and shook his meaty jowls. Why was it always “Picasso”? Why not “Fucking Basquiat”? Or “Fucking Arshile Gorky,” for that matter? While Kagel radioed in the fire department, Nalewajek stood in silence. No it wasn’t Piccaso, it was something else. It was patterns of glass. Symmetry. Reflection. “We going to find this guy, or what?” Kagel is already passing his searchlight over the darker corners of the vast empty building. Nalewajek turns to join him, looking over his shoulder once. Most likely, whoever it was had already found their way back out the same way they had got in. After a few minutes, they return toward the exit.

“What should we do with the masterpiece?” Kagel waves his flashlight over the bits of broken bottle and glue. Nalewajek’s face twists slightly.

“Toss it.” Before the guys from the fire department make their way in with the extinguishers, he watches the cardboard blacken and crumple as the bits of glass sizzle and pop in the heat.

For Frank, it was quite easy finding his way back into the old terminal. Once in, it had only been a matter of finding a nice little space where he could build his fire and keep warm. Yes, it had been time, once more, to leave the City Mission. Once more before winter began. Already he had begun collecting aluminum cans and various sorts of twist tops. He saved them in his pockets and rolled up in his extra pair of pants. One morning, he simply started walking south, and then east. Nalewajek, he had the night off. After supper, he sat in his chair while Sandy sat in the back room on the computer. On the television set there was some new show, “BANISHED.” Twelve contestants are banished to a Tropical Island where they must club each other to “death” with fake clubs. Nalewajek figured it was a metaphor for something. He scratched himself. He poured himself another beer.