Three ceramic rectangular tiles were laying in a suburban public park in a spot about halfway from the street to the basketball courts, surrounded by old grass that’s been growing around the tiles for decades. Each tile was a little less than 18-inches by ten-inches and arranged side by side but a little askew, in random angles from one another. They didn’t form any obvious pattern or symbol. It was almost as if they were left there by mistake and eventually forgotten or ignored and then accepted as just being part of the park. 

This isn’t to say that the park itself isn’t well taken care of or maintained. A community lawn service comes every week in the Spring and Summer to cut the grass and trim the edges and a city janitorial team comes out every three or four days to empty the trash cans and clean up any graffiti that might pop up on the tables and benches and basketball courts. But no one bothers the three random rectangular tile laying out in the middle of the grass that are only noticeable from the fading red hard plastic picnic tables and benches. 

The color of the tiles is a kind of fading beige but it’s hard to say what the original color must have been after laying in the sun all these decades. Whenever a power-wash team comes out to clean the basketball courts and picnic tables and benches, they make sure to give the tiles a good cleaning too. So, like the park, they are relatively well taken care of. It’s just that no one knows why they are there or what they could possibly symbolize or mean. And about once a decade someone will write a story in the local newspaper exploring the genesis of the tiles in the park, but no one has yet found any official record for the reason for their appearance or intention. In fact the tiles have outlasted the existence of numerous local newspapers and now there is no local newspaper. Weird. The tiles have just become an accepted part of the local public park. They may outlast the city itself. JBB

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Tags: accidental permanence, dream journal, Joe bustillos short stories, short stories, what remains

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