On Significance

Montague passed away just last week. The village, frankly, wasn't sure what to think. On the one hand the passing of anyone who resided within their gates was, to be sure, a tragedy, but on the other nobody really knew him. Montague existed in one of those in-between states where the legend was most of the time indistinguishable from reality, and that from the rumors.

Nobody really knew which rumors were true or not, and nobody really cared, either. Probably the only fact to be known for sure was the house in which he lived. But people knew about as much about that house as they did about the man himself. The general consensus was that all his time was spent on his project.

Any time someone in the village mentioned that word it was probably an allusion to Montague. Whether the project even existed was dubious, but it sure was an object in popular culture.

It became a term applied to the undertakings of others: anything that was a futile pursuit of something that certainly did not exist was a project. "Mr. Fletcher is at his project again",

', or "you real-

ize the entire thing is a project, right?" The object of Montague's project was also a matter of debate. Some piece of old poetry or art-a work of fiction that he held to possess some incredible importance. The rumors claimed he worked away with feverish urgency, day in and day out. In the months after his passing the house lay untouched. The project had evolved from a notion of peripheral curiosity to a metaphor that, of course, had no actual connection to a real occurrence. Teenagers eventually found a way into the abandoned building through a window. What was once "Montague's place" became "The house on 3rd street." Even the project fell out of popular usage before too long.

Charlie Oliphant