Order attacked the child as suddenly, as unpredictably as any other form of disease, and he began to sort, to classify.

Maud was surprised one morning to find her haphazardly arranged dresser drawers immaculate; gloves placed together in one location, stockings in another. The housekeeper could not have done this. Maud kept her own room, had always done so.

At first she could not imagine what had happened, and tried to remember whether she, herself, in a distracted, preoccupied way, had actually performed the task while thinking about something else. She had lost objects in this manner, moving them unconsciously around the house while her mind arranged an important funeral, but never in her experience had she organized drawers… consciously or otherwise.

Then she guessed it. The child; the child had done this, slipping through the house like a shadow. Vaguely pleased with this new facet of his behaviour, she decided to let it rest. No harm done, no harm.

She closed the window in her room as she did each morning after a night filled with the perils of vapours, and walked through the doorway down the hall to the sunroom, the light of which burst easily over her as she reached her desk. Settling in, she opened the drawer to remove the accounts book. There, also, order surprised her. Seven lead pencils were arranged according to size in descending scale at the front. Beside them, two erasers, their pink tips and bottoms not a fraction out of line. Adjacent to these lay her gum-backed labels in a pile so regular it resembled a tiny block of wood painted red and white. Her several notebooks were piled, one on top of the other, at the rear of the drawer, like a miniature ziggurat, beginning with the largest account book at the bottom and finishing with the smallest (her collection of drowned individuals) at the top. Now she was beginning to become perplexed. An isolated incident was one thing, but what else had he been into besides drawers?

She was staring into the many cubbyholes directly above the surface of the desk when she realized that the familiar irregularity of the papers she stashed there had also changed. All the envelopes (mostly containing IOUs) had been filed, again according to size, with the smaller ones occupying smaller spaces, the larger, larger spaces and the unclassifiable nowhere to be seen. The child had clearly taken it upon himself to dispose of these irregularities. If they couldn’t be sorted, then they shouldn’t exist.

Maud looked around the room and noted, as she now feared, that its profusion of bric-a-brac was undeniably altered. Objects had been grouped together, classified somehow, though it was difficult for Maud to determine the criteria for these new configurations. Her domestic geography had been tampered with, her home had become a puzzle. The size classification that the child had so neatly applied to the desk was not in evidence anywhere else in the room. Instead, there were these innumerable clusters of small connected objects, some that had been in the room previously, some that had been brought from other rooms to complete a bizarre design determined by the child.

The mantel, she discovered, was covered with cutting, shining things: her letter opener, a pen-knife, three needles from her sewing basket, scissors, a razor blade, which had somehow remained in the house since Charles’ death, and a piece of broken glass. A cherry sidetable, which normally held Charles’ photo, appeared to be empty. But as Maud looked again, it revealed itself to be covered with various forms of detritus: a dust ball, lint from a cotton pocket, a small amount of sand apparently from the driveway, and, most strange, a dirty, soot-filled spider web, found in some corner, no doubt, that she was unaware of, or perhaps from the workshops downstairs. There were ashes, too, probably from the cook stove in the kitchen.

The photograph of Charles? She found it, after searching for some time, situated under the curving arm of the sofa, along with others of her parents, his parents, herself. These were combined with a variety of other flat human images; a paper doll, a steel engraving from Ladies’ Home Journal, and a framed lithograph, from the parlour, of a little girl staring out to sea.

On the windowsill, the presence of a clear paperweight, the magnifying glass her mother-in-law had used to read, her father-in-law’s spectacles, and a pressed glass goblet confounded Maud until she realized that what they had in common was transparency and an innate ability to shatter.

She wondered which had come to the child first: the fairly simple method of classification according to size, or the more complex method of classification by physical property. There were groups of objects, moreover, whose common denominator she couldn’t, for the life of her, identify: the thimble, pearl necklace, and spoon, for instance, or the playing card, chestnut, and emery board.

Maud moved around the room in a bemused manner, taking stock of the situation. The appearance of objects from further rooms caused her to suppose that the whole house had been disturbed as much as it might have been had vandals ransacked it during the night. It would be weeks before her own concept of order was restored. Still, she could not yet become angry. Every time she tried, her curiosity got in the way. These strange little assemblings might be the key to the child’s mind; a garden she’d been denied access to for years. In her heart, she felt like letting him continue. Rearrange it, she would say, it might be better.

On the bookshelf, in front of Great Expectations and Little Dorrit, was a collection of tickets of various sizes… just that, no more; a colourful collection of tickets. Nothing complex here. These came from the ferry boat, or the streetcar, or the opera house… a few from the Terrapin Tower of other amusements near the Falls. One was from a horse race. Maud shuffled them in her fingers, pondering their significance in the child’s mind.

It came to her slowly, the origin of these tickets, very slowly at first. Then, the knowledge exploding in her head like fireworks, she turned and ran from the room, down the long hall. The child, she suddenly knew, had invaded her cupboard, her museum.