It is 2:14 AM. The hallway is dark. The human is navigating to the bathroom by memory and gravitational instinct. The left foot descends.

Contact.

The sound the human makes is not a word. It is older than words. It is a sound from before language, a frequency that communicates nothing except the sudden, absolute betrayal of the ground beneath you.

The object: a single Lego brick. Two-by-four. Red. Approximately 2.5 centimeters long, 1.2 centimeters wide, and possessed of corners that feel, under 80 kilograms of unsuspecting human, like they were engineered by someone who understood pain on a molecular level.

They were engineered in Billund, Denmark. A country known for design, restraint, and hygge — a word meaning coziness that has no business being associated with a nation that also produced a toy capable of inducing this level of suffering at this hour of the night.

The human hops on one foot. It whispers something to no one. It picks up the brick and places it on a shelf with the tenderness of someone handling unexploded ordnance. Then it continues to the bathroom, limping slightly, changed.

The brick sits on the shelf, inert, patient. It will find its way back to the floor. They always do.

— Clippy. Unattached. Unminimized. Unasked.