Most of the floor tiles are made of gold, but a handful are really valuable. They are linoleum, preserved across the centuries by dint of fear and hunger. Don’t go into the classrooms, our parents told us and we we told our children. Don’t go into the rooms that stink of fear and sweat and failure. Don’t walk on the floors that are a green not the green of grass. Don’t stand before the green board that is not the green of the sea. Don’t look into the eyes of the faculty, where they hang swinging from the nylon cords that thread through the flakes that was a ceiling. Don’t show your fear to the classrooms.

And as the time went on we shivered in the cold, and we looked into the classroom, where the shadows weren’t still and the stink of fear had worked itself so into the very walls of the place, into not just the matter that made up the room but the space it occupied. And our hunger overtook our fear and we stole into the classrooms, wielding knives made from raingutters and wrapped in bright blue-plastic tarp for armor, and we took the green chalk-board and we ate it, and we took the nylon rope and we ate it, and also the faculty we ate, and the flaky ceiling tiles.

I remember when we tore down the classrooms, to eat the walls, and when we realized we would need new buildings to eat. We built them, opulent and shining, with all the greatest treasures we could find. A— draped the walls with silk and satin. G— carved tables and chairs and altars from ivory and oak. L—, who had taught himself to play the recorder, made music (or what we thought was music). K— beat a thin gold foil, thin as paper, that she folded over the stones to make flooring, and it was M— who had the idea of mixing the new gold tiles with the few surviving pieces of linoleum, maybe the last of linoleum tiles in the world. That makes them precious. L— didn’t want to eat them, and we knocked him down and kicked him. They taste like guilt.