The City of Woven Streets

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in the gauze of stenches, amidst the fire, where green leaves curl around their edges and darken into bruise-like, there roots push deep into the ground and spread their persistent fingers, listen to the space closed from light and to the traces left there by other creatures. Where all eyes are turned away, the island bleeds into night-water and the landscape grows strange stains. The wings of a moth beat more slowly. A gull quiets, for the tongue has stopped moving in its mouth. People place their hands on their foreheads, or the foreheads of their children, feel the rash spreading on their faces and the invisible claws digging at their lungs; they burn with fever in their beds. Black gondolas carry glass coffins into the burial ground and ashes make murky blotches in the sea where they silently dissolve into the waves, ghosts of breathing cut short.

In the fire that is slower than flames she stays awake, and when sleep takes her, it carries her between unravelling walls, behind darkness-holding doors, over cracked floors, in the rifts of which black water rushes. It hands her words hidden within covers, in which everything is inscribed, but the writing escapes her, and still she turns away. She wants the floors to be unbroken, she wants the walls to be whole again. She wants to step into the map of threads and follow the girl who walks before her, to fill the hole she has always hidden in herself.

She stands on the dream-cliff and raises her hands, and the dream-sea hears the call she does not know is the call of others, long gone. The strands of the Web of Worlds shine around her, made from sky and stars, ready to receive her touch: pull one thread, and all will unravel.

She drops her hands.

Fire swells like flood, eats words in its way, exhausts itself into ashes again, and in their wrap