A boy picks up the brightly segmented Rubik’s cube, intrigued by the game. Sort by color; the concept is simple. He flips the cube over in his hands, trying to figure out the trick. He wants the boxes to align. He wants the puzzle solved and defined.

The boxes don’t match up easily. It wouldn’t be a game if they did. The green ones will line up, and then the yellow. The answer is almost found, and then a blue cube appears in the middle of a red line with no possible escape. The path is not obvious. The cube is not that easy.

After awhile, the colored squares lose their allure. Solving becomes obligatory and the cube is an annoyance based upon the definition of its purpose.

Day after day the boy frantically twists the squares of the cube around and around.

Align!

And then one day he quits.

More with indifference than fury the boy tosses the Rubik’s Cube over his shoulder, not bothering to noticing that it has hit the wall and shattered. The game is destroyed.

The colored box fragments lie unsorted. But what good is a puzzle solved?

Worse than broken pieces, the fate of the once brilliantly mismatched squares would have been their stagnancy. A sorted, six sided book end that used to be a game.

Luciana, 19