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::: Cities & Impossibilities :::

By ~ Lia Hall

In the city of Fabiola, the armature alternately dissolves and integrates. Its light evaporates as a rope soaks up kerosene to burn within the lamp's bulbous chimney glass. It brightens with the food of more rope.

The sky is a blueprint that dangles contrails. They seamlessly disintegrate into the solid blue that masks the stars. The funeral pyres remain for mulch. No cars run off the pipeline. Can't you see? Not through the particulate matter, like that which covers the nightness.

In this particular matter, in the township of Fabs, light switches remain a mystery--dissociated from their antiquated uses. Historians and archaeologists sit around the conversation pit; drinking hot clover madhu; playing with "Scrabble" tiles on a "Monopoly" board. None of the original intentions or rules that govern, like that of the light switch, were retained, recorded, or deciphered. The principal spirit or goal, however, has been preserved: to play a game. As long as these professionals have something on the table with which they could occupy their eyes and many dexterous fingers while employing the muscles attached to their fine lips, then they could keep the criticism of outsiders at bay for a time. After all, there are no other inhabitants of Fabiola, who express any expertise on the origins of monopoly, much less the meaning of scrabble letters with numbers on them. Some have a faint notion that they might pertain to something called the "Periodic Table." But periods, whether related to time and punctuation, or elements and chemistry, are generally beyond the concerns of common folk. They would rather enforce their faith that the conversation pit figures are engaged in crafting important plans for Fabiola's future. Perhaps literacy and cultivation practices will be taught or ways to detect mines in the "no-colonization field."

Fabiola is rich. She lacks a lot of the elements typical to a traditional city. Most notably, she lacks hatred. Her inhabitants know neither the meaning of this word, nor the implications it has in alternate dimensions. For the reader, examples might include: rape, diseased blankets, starvation of nutrients, decimation of species, and ego hunger. Due to the absence of hate, there is also little comprehension of fear. Many outsiders might accuse this township to be of little consequence--accomplishing nothing. On the contrary, they manage to maintain healthy levels of body heat, fat, and water.
They survive on little food and darkness. Their chief nutrients hail from clean air and stillness. They use and revere their legs so highly that artisans sculpted and dedicated public sites to pieces of substantial and muscularly articulated columns of legs. One popular site is located at the center of the town square where the townsfolk surround the celebrated appendages and dance before sunrise every morning. Then they stretch out on the cobblestones to roll around massaging their fleshy and fabulously-used proteins. Shortly after, they soak their feet in a nearby stream and gaze at the continuous morphing of their faces reflected. The deeper they peer, the more rocks appear and the sense of cold and wet passes and charges the electricity of their skins. Thus, forgetting all about their limbs.