He played with the yellow blocks only. Roughed by sandpaper and sticky fingers they handled well. Warm faces, chipped edges.

He was not a builder. He lined and walked them one by one. The block shaped like a bridge he teetered leg to leg, imagining an elephant crossing the rug in search of water. Due to the circular sweep of his arm from one side to another as he sat crisscrossed the elephant would wander in half-circles to and fro until the arm tired. No one else played Thirsty Elephant. No one understood a game without rules—excepting the obvious one against players shifting their bottoms to get the elephant further along. But that was a rug rule, not a blocks rule. Players knew you sit where you sat and that’s that, so rarely was that rule violated and rarely still occasioned to be. Blocks had a tactile simplicity that other engagements such as paints or pasta threading rendered mindless.

Stark. The word to use was stark.

But he wasn’t a bedwetter or a crybaby, or any other idiot. He classed himself among the finger knitters who sought the satisfaction of a craft well done in narrow company, the broader perhaps likewise capable but lacking the diligence to stay the artistic pursuit. For the blocks lived unguarded in the topmost cubby where anyone could take them, anybody at all. But it seemed that only he discerned their virtue through the accumulation of finger oil and filth in the cracked milkpaint.

For he did not wash his hands, nor did he cover his sneezes. Those he directed at the block in hand. If he thought of germs he imagined them shining it like grocery mist on cabbages, gracing the common with the mystique of possession, permanence, unmistakeability. He couldn’t help the impulse to mark the blocks, if invisibly, his.

Not theirs. Not stark. Not mindless.

Mark or none, only he handled them. His neighbors had the poor taste not to join—but, reasoning they had no taste, they might have shrugged and enjoyed the reds and blues that got left in the box. Some had attempted. But neither reds nor blues were to be extracted. None but he could heft the solid maple shapes. His strength and dexterity made the late bloomer an object of envy.

Indeed he was remarkably active for his age. The others were unable to sit on the rug and follow his rigorous sweeping to and fro, ever hastening upon certain reflections to the point of losing hold and flinging the elephant into a fern or a rollator.

And then what did thirst matter?