Fiction 03

Few are the ones who remember that our City used to grow once, when our appetite for dwellings was as relentless as our imagination. Now, we have too many; our citizens, searching for the high ground which would grant protection from the rising seas, have left them behind, derelict and barren, the darkness in their windows like missing teeth in a crooked, well-meaning grin.

In time, one by one, the empty buildings started disappearing altogether, sometimes leaving behind a door, a window, a cornice, or a fragment of wall; new piles of carcasses sitting atop old ones, of pine trees, rubbish, and plague victims, all buried before anyone can remember. Now cleared, the voids were appearing differently to anyone who looked at them - a mother saw playgrounds for her unborn son, while a priest saw a handsome spire, its sides encrusted with pious words of devotion. Between all of the spaces, no idea remained unbuilt - a new City made of pauses started to emerge, growing as the old one shrunk, made only from the opportunities the latter never had.

While these spaces became farms, hospices, and inns, in the neighbourhoods of the fair and wealthy, gates with intricate ornamentations of sea shells, acorns or mango fruit began to span the voids between the sumptuous mansions. As you pass them by, through a door left slightly ajar, you might glimpse a wild goat running up the vertical side of a snowy mountain, an elk quietly grazing in the middle of a tundra, a lion leading his pride through the empty wilderness, or a scarab beetle pushing a sphere of dung while drawing long, undulating lines through glittering sands. These forlorn worlds have now found new life in the City, each on a different street according to their origins, echoes of ecologies long gone; together they form the Great Mosaic, named after what an old woman once said, seeing it from above. From behind the exotic foliage, many pairs of eyes are watching us; we, the strange creatures who denied them their original habitats, who are now desperately trying to hold onto the diminishing numbers of both ourselves and our planetary family by inviting them into our homes. Their gazes are not vengeful, but curious, as there is something germinating in the heart of the Mosaic, a most bizarre secret, which greatly confuses beasts large and small. When the inhabitants of the Mosaic tire of seeing a panther chasing an antelope across the savannah, they need only exchange house with the ones who are now bored of the penguins endlessly synchronising in their diving, swallowing the plentiful fish whole. In this way, the watchers always have a constant fresh supply of subjects, and vice versa.

But the secret is that amidst lions, hyenas, bears and birds of paradise, are species that have already gone extinct, and are now replaced either by highly sophisticated automata, or by humans who, driven insane by the guilt of knowing the truth, have recreated the animalistic appearance with their garb. They live on the pastures, grazing and migrating with their quadruped step siblings, or in marshes with diaphanous fogs, swimming with the alligators, eating frogs, and opening their mouths to let the tickbirds clean their teeth. This secret is so precious, and their guilt so intensely infernal, that even they are now convinced of their own bestial nature.