The grandstand that folds against the wall

For the record: the pull-out wooden bleachers occupy the east wall of the gymnasium in a folded state for approximately three hundred days a year, a slab of varnished maple no thicker than a filing cabinet, waiting. When unfolded, ahead of the winter tournament or the spring assembly, the mechanism groans through eleven rows in a single continuous motion, and we have voted, not unanimously, that this groan constitutes the truest sound the building makes. Splinters remain a minority concern; our majority position holds that four decades of shellac have sealed the grain past the point of injury, though two of us maintain otherwise and decline to sit in the back row as a matter of principle. Children find the gap beneath the risers before their parents do, and we have entered into the record at least one specimen recovered from that gap after a full basketball season: a retainer, in its case, unclaimed. The bleachers seat approximately four hundred bodies at full extension and roughly nobody at rest, folded flat against the cinderblock like a held breath. Whether the building was designed around the bleachers or the bleachers were fitted afterward to a building that assumed standing room, the surviving blueprints do not specify, and we have tabled the question twice, our votes on the matter rarely unanimous. What we can confirm, without dissent, is the smell: dust, wax, and the particular mustiness of wood that spends most of its life folded in the dark.

The Committee on Ordinary Objects