When he left for work that morning it was an empty box and 5,000 pieces scattered across the coffee table. By the time he came home they had all the pieces turned right side-up and sorted into rough piles. They'd progressed from the coffee table to the floor some time after dinner, and when he went to bed that night they had all the edges done, an enormous picture frame displaying a vast expanse of nothing.

He peeked in from time to time during the day, watching as they held up pieces to the light and tried to make sense of them, conversing in the language of color and shape. They worked with almost singled-minded determination, pausing in the course of the day to eat or watch the game, but always in the end drawn inexorably back to the multicolored enigma that had claimed most of the living room floor.

He watched as, little by little, pictures emerged from the chaos. A woman's face took shape amid a sea of frothy clouds; a faint golden aura in the upper left corner hinted at the sun. Black-feathered swans with stars for eyes floated unanchored near the bottom of the frame, all the pieces that made up their pond as yet undiscovered. The images seemed arbitrary and unconnected, disembodied from the larger picture. His attention wandered freely between them, his eyes skipping over the negative space, trying to bring all the fragments together into a unified whole. But the longer he looked, the less he understood.

The pieces didn't fit. The shadows cast had nothing to do with the light. There was chaos, and from the chaos a picture was emerging, but he refused to see it. Where was the charming farm house, nestled into a valley of a emerald hills? Where was Monet's garden, redrawn in 6-bit color on mass-produced recycled cardboard? Where was the familiarity, the order, the sense? There wasn't even a picture on the box. How would they ever complete it? It was impossible. Yet as he watched the pieces came together, changing hands like money, or love letters, finding their places within the confusion.

Four days they worked, every waking hour; by the end they were no longer sleeping, and could not be lured away even with the prospect of food. Verbal dialogue all but ceased, and yet when he watched them, he swore they were communicating still. Heads bent together, blonde and brpwn, understanding flowed between them without ever a word spoken. And he felt, deeply, guiltily, a stab of jealousy for their understanding. Hadn't he always longed for such a connection? Longed, and been denied?

They were so unlikely, but they made a twisted kind of sense. Sarcasm and sincerity. Callousness and pervasive good will. And a shared language, a shared love-- the same music ran through them both. If he ignored the pattern and focused only on the shape of the pieces he could almost understanding. Their mouths were two perfect pieces to a puzzle they completed. The picture was mystifying, but it was beautiful.