Fiction 01
No one knows how many of the Marbles tell true stories, but they line the length of the tallest wall you will ever see. Each one, lit by its own scented brazier, talks of a city long gone, which can only be rebuilt and refurbished in your mind. Like shards of broken glass, they are scattered in ways which follow no logical pattern, and can be rearranged into new formations each time someone touches them. If shards can be refashioned to form either a wine glass or a window anew, so can the Marbles tell multiple histories at the same time, one for every onlooker, each as valid and as true as the next. In their intricacy, the uncarved spaces within the pieces receive your anxiety about the current world: how it will never produce any event remarkable enough to be immortalised through marbles, braziers, or the wonderfully strange plants lining the spaces between them - only then, their purpose is fulfilled. The Marbles are immortal and they stare down at our slow extinction.
Below the carvings, flames frantically dance in the ornate braziers, each burning with an incense carefully selected by the carers specifically remunerated for this task. As this is the sight many see when they first enter the city, the smells of the past flood your nostrils, exposing our culture while simultaneously covering up the marine miasmas floating above.
If you ever find yourself meandering in the area mid week, I recommend you find the time to visit the Marbles close to dusk, when the gib doors lie open, and locals are pouring through. What is meant to be a space of solitude and silent reverence is jolted into life by the dancing shadows of the ones who clean the walls, change the scents, or weed out undesirable vegetation growing in the gardens. As the sky darkens and the work starts winding down, the sound of bottles opening and the ensuing neighbourly chatter reverberates against the high wall and meets your ear like a cloud of acoustic perfume.
Don’t hesitate to approach and warm up by the flames forever dancing in their braziers just above your head, as they share enough heat to keep you warm for a summer’s evening. If the moods are spirited, the stories you hear will outshine the ones set in stone, their preciousness enhanced by their impermanence. I have lingered there many nights, listening to the old advising the young, abandoning my thoughts to odd tales looking at the bas-reliefs through half closed eyes, until all but the things around the fire disappeared - I even forgot about the tumultuous roars of the sea which lies just beyond the wall.