“We all hate them here, and soon you’ll learn to as well.”

“Why should I hate someone for dreaming?”

“This is their dream,” he says pointing vehemently at the earth, and then adds in a bitter, wounded tone, “and we are their creatures. They disguise themselves and trick us, toy with us, draw us into their empty themes, leave us stuck in their follies ... trifling with us and then, when we need them—where are they? They’re gone!”

And then he turns away from me and plunges his face into his hands.

Later, he looks up again, to the sky, the street, and murmurs, “Now we forget, now is the time.”

*

I want to browse the stores. Jil Punkinflake, same again as ever, shrugs at them.

“Be around tonight and I’ll show you something better.”

... and he’s gone in a twinkling like a fairy man.

I look at fine calfskin notebooks, bales of foolscap, ranks of somber iron type, casks of ink. This purplish-skinned man sells pencils so soft you can sharpen them with your breath. A stunning woman in a low-cut blouse sells fountain pens, and I stand there for I don’t know how long transfixedly turning back and forth in my fingers a pen all made of an intermittently translucent, hard yet elastic substance. There is powdery smoke in it forming a minutely-worked interlocking pattern of silky tongues and smart hooks, the nib is gold, laced in a sinuous engraved line narrower than a hair. The pattern is engulfing, and I wander through it like a garden maze.

For all my looking, I haven’t been able to find much of anything in the way of stories. I found only one storier, and it seemed to be closed, or perhaps sealed for a private party, behind its boxy wooden gates. I cross the commercial area, heading back toward the Embalmer’s College. Hoofbeats bang in the street and I hang back to let the carriage pass. It’s the hearse I’d seen earlier, which had wrung words of rapturous praise from the mortuary students. The horses are massive up close, and pass me with weightless power. I watch the carriage sail along the road and note the coffin hatch up above the wreath on the back. The hearse slows as it passes away; the window opens, and a well-shaped, woman’s arm, in a tiny-flowered grey sleeve, unfolds from the passenger compartment. The laced hand drops a handkerchief in the street, and vanishes; the carriage turns the corner with weird sharpness and is gone.

I am alone in the street. The handkerchief retains the pinched point where her fingers held it a moment, and is faithfully embroidered with a beautiful character I don’t recognize. The smell is like grape lees, wind chimes, rotting roses. When I raise my eyes from it, I notice a maybe four-year-old girl walking along the pavement opposite me, one hand in her mother’s hand and the other pointing at me; and she does a funny thing. Grinning, her chubby face lit up with an expression of incandescent surprise, she peels her lips back from her little white teeth and red gums, and bites the air three or four times, looking me in the eye and pointing.