THE NICHE TO NOWHERE
Nicholas walked past it a hundreds of times as he walked from his apartment at Hyphenated-Writer Street toward the downtown along Copernicus Street. It was a niche hollowed out of the embankment alongside the sidewalk. It was made of dusty and darkened red bricks with green moss growing particularly on the sides and top. It had a little sand at the bottom. Workman probably left that the last time they pulled up the cobblestones in the sidewalk to even it out a bit. The cobblestones were on a bed of sand, but in wintertime some of the stones seemed to sink. What struck Nicholas most when he looked at the niche on this particular day was that it led to nowhere. It just stopped. There didn’t seem to be any reason for it to be there since it had no evident function. There
