The City of St Arbuc
As everybody knows, before empire, when the world was flat, a person could be anything he or she chose – animal, vegetable or mineral – and any size too: as big as the earth itself, or as small as a grain of sand. Now, on the other side of history, in no-time, with the earth pulled out flat again, you might find if you dig only a little way down the remains of a ringed wall, and within that ring of stone the fragments of a little city. Did it come before, or did it come after? That is one question, but you won’t find any answers digging through the dust, no matter how deep. You might uncover, though, huddled among the detritus a desiccated human body, one which refused animal, vegetable, mineral, one which made a hash of everything, drove all life out of the place, and then sat down in the dust to expire.
I - you can call me Oléo - am going to tell you all about that human body - the Prince of St Arbuc - and I’m going to tell you about that place.
This little city, no bigger than a small town to tell the truth, was known to its inhabitants as St Arbuc, and it was founded on a nameless desert plain which, at one time, inside time, within the cradle of history, back in the Old Time when Europe still had a name, had not yet been placed inside its own edges. The wind which tears across this plain bears a flotsam of plastic and enough dust to bury a city in a matter of months. That’s the dust we’re digging in. History, made of particles far smaller, devoid of substance in any familiar way, little 0s and 1s, fell through the holes which riddle matter, and was replaced with or maybe turned into that dust, that sand and rock. There was sand, sand on rock, rock and dust, exquisite heat, utter absence of water – until the well was discovered, or was it made (you find it there yourself as you dig in the sand and dust and rock, a funnel of arranged stones going down to a withered root) and the people if they didn’t exactly come here then certainly they stayed.
Animal, vegetable, mineral.
Outside of history, with the world made flat and shorn of all inheritance, the builders of the city of St Arbuc found that by flux they could be a buffalo in the morning, the arrow that kills it in the evening, and the constellation of stars which turns above both as they sleep, sated, at night.
