The City of Woven Streets

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out of sight, in the dark grow things that bear the greatest weight and burn, for in light everything grows slighter. Sometimes strands spend a long time seeking each other, fumbling without light, and interweave without knowing that it is exactly what the web wants.

The door is mist-thin, the door is solid and robust, the door is translucent as glass and time behind it is dream-time, where the threads of the web shine faintly. There wander all those who have begun and ended and gone; their thoughts are open towards dreams every moment, and the threads tremble at their touch, becoming something else under it. The strands twist into painful knots and stretch to a breaking point, they settle next to each other and take a new shape that shatters the world in order to rebuild it. And time, dream-time, is brief and endless, is here and yet not, it is already out of thoughts’ reach although it only just began. A moment or countless ones have passed, and no one else moves the threads any more.

Mist gathers around the island, it fills the streets and fills the houses, it drowns as dregs into the sea and wraps all things alive and dead, clings to the threads as weight that will not wear away. Mist encircles the beds where people carry each other across the sea of night, encircles what must go and what must stay. But dreams will not submit to chains; where the weight and burn are greatest they still roam free. The dream-cliff is ready. The dream-sea is ready. The dream-threads are silent and ready, and deep under the sea one can already sense what is coming. A story that must be carried far away so it would not disappear.

I stand in the broken darkness that is her gate and my home.

The world is ready to drown. The world is ready to rise. On its surface walk creatures who have forgotten their dreams, and only rarely do they remember that their hours are brief and their days are brittle, and there will not be many chances at happiness.

Quiet,