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Yevgeny the L-Shaped Object fell through a cloudless chasm. From time to time, his unseen master caused him to rotate by ninety degrees.

"What shall become of me?" he thought. "Will I form a bridge above a single-square cavity, an unfillable, yawning void beneath me? Or will I be wedged uncomfortably between Yuri the Stick, standing there beneath me like a pike, and the upward-protruding crosspiece of Ekaterina the T-Shaped Object?"

Suddenly, he felt a tremendous force moving him to the extreme left edge of the chasm. And then he saw it: a perfect L-shaped gap!

"Will I complete three rows?" he thought. "Is it possible? And yet-- If this occurs my brief life will end! It is no great shakes being a falling L-shaped object, but it is an existence of a sort, and to be treasured! Is it yet time for it to end, even if such a departure from the wheel of existence is the goal most desired by every L-shaped piece?" Yevgeny pondered this for many long moments.

He fell-- and slotted perfectly into the L-shaped gap. Yet existence did not end-- not completely! He felt a strange thrill as three of his four squares were annihilated. Yevgeny was now but a single square.

"What has happened?" Yevgeny thought. Then he remembered: There was an empty square somewhere to his right! His remaining element existed within an as-yet-unfilled row.

Suddenly, Mikhail the 2x2 Square fell directly on top of him, and darkness closed in.

"Horrors!" thought Yevgeny the No Longer L-Shaped Piece. "What claustrophobe's nightmare is this? Shall I be entombed just as the poor hero of Poe's 'Cask of Amontillado'? Can I breathe in here, buried alive?!" Somehow, though, he could, as if a sustaining force emerged from the very ground of creation, here in his darkest hour.

Timeless ages passed, as he saw nothing, heard nothing-- only yearned, now, for the completion that was beyond his control.

When it happened, he felt it only as a faint chthonic click, a sensation beyond sound. It was the sensation of a piece, its identity unknown to him, falling into the remaining slot in his remaining row.

He had time to think: "Finally! Yet so much remains undone--"

A moment of spiritual ecstacy-- and then Yevgeny, his remaining row completed, was reabsorbed into the Cosmic All.

May 2025

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