Little Red Book

I woke with the dawn aching in my bones, curled in the cab of my FJ Cruiser like a question mark left unanswered overnight. The city around me was hushed, barely breathing. A few birds stitched the sky with sound, but otherwise, silence. I stretched outside the truck like a cat at the chiropractor — spine cracking, muscles groaning, soul reluctantly returning from wherever it had wandered off to in the night.

I stood there for a long time first. Listening. Watching. Letting the metaphor settle in — because I wasn’t just photographing a pile of books.

I found a diner nearby — the kind that serves redemption by the cup and eggs over easy without asking too many questions. I washed up in the bathroom mirror, splashed my face until the stranger staring back began to resemble someone I knew. Coffee helped.

Afterward, I drifted. No plan. Just a camera in my hand and the sense that something was waiting. A block here, a corner there. Then, suddenly, it was there — not leaping out so much as simply being. As if it had always been.

A threaded stainless steel rod driven into the ground, books skewered like birds on a wire, their spines torn and pages bloated from rain. Some were opened mid-sentence. Others clung shut, as if guarding secrets too tender to tell. And near the bottom, one scarlet volume — saturated and mute — held the whole tower upright, or so it seemed. It wasn’t titled. I named it anyway: Little Red Book.

There was no sign, no explanation. It wasn't part of any exhibition. It was the exhibition. A sculpture born of forgetting. A protest? A prayer? Maybe just someone’s last stand for meaning in a world that no longer files things under “sacred.”

To me, it looked like scripture that had fallen out of favor. The Gospel According to No One. A quiet martyrdom of language. Or maybe just the final form of knowledge: impaled, weathered, left to lean against the ruins and still somehow — still — refusing to fall.

I didn’t take the photo right away. I stood there for a long time first. Listening. Watching. Letting the metaphor settle in — because I wasn’t just photographing a pile of books. I was photographing what’s left when nobody’s looking. When the story persists, even as the world forgets the plot.

What small item carries outsized meaning in your life?

— Lawrence

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