The Wire Girl and the City of Lace
Some
said they had all come from a country of lace, long ago. Some said the city of lace thrived, hidden
behind the sandstone cliffs that marked the boundaries of the wire city. Some said the city had unraveled long ago and
was only a town of tangled, fluttering threads anymore. Some said, though it hadn’t unraveled
altogether, the city of lace struggled.
Everyone
else usually laughed; you couldn’t build with something as fragile and delicate
as lace. The threads weren’t strong like
wires. They showed their age; they would
break. Everyone else laughed.
But
the wire girl shuffled closer and listened.
And she wondered which was true.
After
listening to these stories from those who believed in the city of lace, the
wire girl would go walking along the base of the sandstone cliffs, her head
full of stories. One day she wandered farther
than she had ever gone before. The wire
girl stumbled upon a cave, its mouth such a gentle continuation of the cliff's
curve that she nearly walked into it before she realized what she was doing. She stood for a moment, looking at this
sudden highway through the formerly impenetrable cliffs.
She
stepped inside.
The
wire girl kept walking, even when the cave chilled. She kept her fingers on the left wall,
running them along the crumbly sandstone that skittered and dusted under the
sharp edges of her.
The
sandstone changed.
She
still couldn't see, but the texture shifted, softened, as a faint light began
to gleam in the distance. The wire girl
emerged from the cave, blinking as the sunlight glanced off her dress, and
turned to look at the cave walls.
At
first she couldn't see any difference.
The sandstone was still lined with the deposits of hundreds of
years. But then she saw that the lines
of the cave walls were actually thousands of trembling threads, stretched from
some strange source deep within the sandstone out of the mouth of the cave
toward the city of lace.
When
she came to the heart of the city she realized that the people, too, were made
of lace. They were knotted, just as she
herself was twisted, into shape, and their clothes were of the same patterns
that made up their homes. The wire girl
tried not to stare, but she found that the people of the city were staring at
her, too.
Here
and there, in the holes of the buildings, she noticed glints and gleams. Looking closer at a corner of a nearby house,
she spied a bit of metal running up the house’s side. The wire girl stared, astonished that the
city of lace would think to use something so seemingly foreign to it.
“Surprised,
little one?"
She
looked up and found that the voice belonged to a large lace lion whose shoulder
came to her own. His mane was an
explosion of curlicues, his flicking tail a tendril from a flower across his
back. The wire girl had never seen
anything like him before. But he
chuckled at her astonishment in a way that made it quite impossible to be
afraid of him.
"A
little," she said. "Everything
else is lace here. I didn't expect to
see metal. It reminds me..."
"Of
home?" the lion asked. The wire
girl nodded. "Did you think we'd
never heard of alloys or metallurgy here?"
He chuckled again and, displaying wiry claws, lifted one paw to point
across the square. "Do you see that
house over there? It's a library now,
but it's been here longer than I have.
Things that old need propping up sometimes, repairs." He leaned close as if sharing a secret. "We had to put wire in the
framework."
The
wire girl sighed. "It's not at all
how I imagined it."
"Is
it better or worse?"
"I
don't know yet."
The
lace lion laughed. “Let me show you more
of our fair city, and then we’ll see what you think.” The wire girl followed him across the square,
where he turned back for a moment and nodded toward the stately building making
up one side of the square. The Council
House, he told her, where the sheriff and the mayor settled disputes between
the guilds.
He told her of the Archers, who
protected the city with their bows. He
told her of the Dyers, who decorated parts of the city with vibrant
colors. He told her of the Designers,
who drew the patterns for the lace and knotted the buildings together from the
threaded sandstone.
The lace buildings rose on either
side as the lace lion and the wire girl strolled down the road. The wire girl glinted in the sun, drawing the
townspeople’s attention to her. But she
didn’t notice, because they had come to a clock tower standing alone on a
corner.
“That used to be a train station,”
the lion told her. “The rest of it was
unraveled after someone tore holes in it.
But we managed to save the clock tower.”
The
wire girl looked up at the tower and asked, “You had a train station? I mean, people came here?”
“How
do you think we learned about metal?” the lion replied. “Of course, we don’t get so many visitors
anymore. Some people never wanted them
here in the first place.”
For
a moment the wire girl doubted the wisdom of staying much longer in the city of
lace. But her skirt had snagged on
something, and as she bent to untangle it, she spied a strange structure on a
bluff above the city. The lion followed
her gaze and said, “Ah, yes. The
castle.”
They
climbed Castle Rock, which the lion explained was mostly threadstone and
sandstone, riddled with caves. The
castle, or what was left of it, stood lonely at the top of the slope. Its edges were fraying, its corners
unraveling, its walls worn through in places.
Forlorn bits of thread fluttered in the breeze. The wire girl shuddered.
“The
royals left years ago,” the lion said.
“They have other castles in other cities, and someone kept tearing holes
in this one. Trying to make a point, I
suppose.”
“A
point about what?” the wire girl couldn’t help asking.
The
lion sighed. “The royal family traveled
so much from city to city that they brought new ideas with them whenever they
visited here. It was the beginning of
the same riot that unraveled the train station.
Some people wanted the city to remain entirely lace. They still do.”
At
home in the wire city, some said that lace was too weak to build with. The wire girl reached out and strummed a few
loose threads in the castle wall.
Certainly the edges of the hole were fragile, but their neighbors
remained taut and strong. She wondered.
When
the wire girl and the lion went back to the square, they found a confusion of
lace people gathered in front of the library.
A few ran past the wire girl, with the crowd shouting after them to get
more thread, heavy thread.
The
wire girl twisted her fingers into the lion’s mane as he made his way through
the crowd, gently weaving between the angry lace people. At the center of the mob stood the Archers
with their bows leveled at another lion made of lace. Behind him, a fresh hole marred the surface
of the old library. The wire girl could
see the books, their titles embroidered on their spines.
“Oscar,
what’s happened?” the wire girl’s guide asked.
The second lion glanced wildly between the Archers, the mob, and his
brother.
“It
wasn’t lace anymore, Leo,” he wailed.
“It had metal.” Then Oscar’s gaze
fell on the wire girl, and his tail began to thrash. The wire girl watched as Oscar’s tail whipped
harder and harder and became tangled in the loose threads from the hole behind
him.
The
lace people had returned with their heavy thread, but they didn’t appear to
know what to do with it. Their knotted
eyes narrowed uneasily.
“We
can’t have him tearing holes in everything,” someone shouted.
“Maybe
we should take the metal out of
everything again.”
“Are
you crazy? The city would unravel in no
time.”
“Let’s
unravel him.”
“We
can’t!”
“He
is my brother,” Leo growled, turning to face the crowd.
“What
if we tangle him up instead?” the wire girl asked, looking at the way Oscar’s
tail had caught in the threads of the library.
The
crowd of lace quieted. Even Oscar looked
surprised.
“You
could weave him a plinth,” she continued, “and have him stay there.”
“But
he’s torn holes in everything else.
What’s to stop him from doing the same with his plinth?” someone called
out.
“I
will watch him,” Leo said. “Make me a
matching plinth, and I will stay there to keep an eye on him.”
So
the people of lace made the plinths with the heavy thread and put them in front
of the Council House. Oscar glared at
them all from the right, his tail still lashing until an exasperated group of
townspeople wove that down too. Leo
settled onto the left plinth, his gaze fixed on his petulant brother.
As
the lace people dispersed, the wire girl sidled closer to Oscar. “Maybe from here you can still keep an eye on
the city,” she said in a comforting tone.
The lion scowled.
“He
might listen to you one day,” Leo said, “but right now you should be getting
home.”
“I
want to stay,” the wire girl protested.
Leo
smiled. “You can always come back to
visit. You’ll know right where to find
me, after all. I’m the lion on the
left.”
She
sounded strange to her neighbors when she returned through the sandstone caves,
her head full of stories again. The wire
girl said she had been to a city of lace, where the houses quivered in breezes
and faded in sunlight. People’s clothes
were knotted and sewn. The lace people
made everything out of thread – cotton, wool, sometimes silk. Few bits of hardness broke up the patterned
city. Except, insisted the wire girl to
her astonished listeners, here and there, in the newer neighborhoods, where a
bit of bright wire shone through.
