My Final Project, A Fable

The Wire Girl and the City of Lace

 Once there was a wire girl who lived in a wire city.  The houses shone in the sunlight and grew warm to the touch.  People’s clothes grew brittle in winter.  The wire people made everything out of metal - brass, copper, silver, sometimes gold.  Few bits of softness broke up the metallic city.  Except here and there, in the older neighborhoods, where a bit of yellowing lace fluttered.

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.