“You’re going to have to try to reach that upper corner, Kyle! It’s still a little wrinkled!”
Winston Clayton shouted through his cupped hands at the adolescent boy perched upon the railing to the billboard’s lofty platform. The lottery offices recognized Winston’s formal petition for a new sign to stand beside the Allentown housing stack. Winston liked to think that all those photographs showing how the stack’s citizens had made the most of the rubble that surrounded their home had made the difference in the end, that perhaps a photograph of Ms. Pence’s rebar tulips had been the final factor that swayed the lottery to grant Allentown a new billboard. Winston certainly didn’t doubt that the lottery considered those of Allentown to be a prosperous people whose efforts deserved a chance to settle a new planet.
Winston gathered a breath and shouted again at Kyle’s back. “No! That didn’t get that crease out! You just pushed the wrinkle a little further up into that corner!”
“Easy there, son.” Old Ralph Washington stood at Winston’s side. “No need pushing Kyle so hard that he topples off of that platform. Not now that we’ve come this far.”
Winston nodded. “Oh, I should know better. It’s just such a wonderful sign.”
“It sure is,” moisture filled Ralph’s eyes. “You know, I think my old feet might yet step on a new world.”
Winston felt proud to look upon the housing stack’s new sign. It was no ordinary billboard of paint. A million tiny, electronic pixels stitched the sign together, offering a glow that the sun’s glare couldn’t diminish during the day, a glow that bathed Allentown’s courtyard in light come the night. A woman and a man dressed in the uniforms of the lottery surveyor’s stood atop a high hill, their helmets removed so that their pixelated hair of brown and blonde swayed to invisible breezes. The woman held the man’s forearm, and the man pointed to a lush valley of green that stretched below them. The sign’s pixels pulsed and the first butterfly-like alien appeared from the billboard’s bottom-left corner, blinking through a rainbow of colors as it fluttered across the billboard. A swarm of companions soon followed, rising from the sign’s bottom border to cover the underlying image of the surveying crew with color. The wings twirled, and though the billboard possessed no means to generate sound, Winston thought he heard a buzz as that exotic cloud of butterfly-like creatures shifted and changed to spell out the message known so well by those who lived among the housing stacks – the planets were for the prosperous.
Upon the platform, Kyle leaned precariously forward, his fingers stretching to reach that small wrinkle that was the billboard’s single blemish.
“Careful, Kyle!” Winston shouted. “Do what you can! Not your fault there’s a little crease way up there by that corner!”
Kyle was no less enamored by the pulsating billboard than anyone else, and one of his feet slipped from the railing as Kyle leaned still further forward. Winston gasped, and Ralph turned his gaze away so that he wouldn’t watch Kyle fall from such heights upon the ruin that still sprawled beneath that billboard. But Kyle caught enough of his balance to direct his fall upon the platform. He grunted as his knees struck the scaffold. Yet it took him only a few seconds before he again gathered his breath and composure before climbing back upon the railing. The lottery billboard promised so much potential, and so Kyle couldn’t be faulted for perhaps stretching too far.
“That’s excellent, Kyle! You really can’t see that wrinkle from down here at all!” Winston tried to coerce the young man down.
Ralph nodded. “Really, Kyle! It looks great! You have to know exactly where to look to catch any sign of that crease!”
Kyle’s body trembled upon the railing as he looked back at his friends and neighbors watching him from the courtyard. “Oh, it’s only a little further! I think I can reach it if I only stretch just a little more!