“Poor thing.”

  Luoth sighed, as red as a bar of gold fresh from the furnace. He wiped the sweat from his brow with a plaid handkerchief, his ruined hat tucked under his arm.

  “It's gone insane.”

  A persistent chirping caught Seluma's attention, distracting her from the dead trolley. The insect maid stirred, disheveled, still holding a dirty bowl in one hand.

  “Should I call the fire department? Are there any casualties? Should we evacuate the area?”

  Seluma sighed loudly, but the overzealous employee seemed indifferent to any sign of distress.

  “No emergency,” she huffed. “Call them, but tell them there's only debris to be removed.”

  Bizz managed to gesture with the bowl without spilling it, as if it were glued to her hand.

  “Right away!” she burst out, sprinting forward with two pairs of skinny little legs.

  “No one's hurt!” Seluma called after her, just to make sure. Last thing she needed was having a caravan of doctors, or even undertakers, in her way just before the morning rush hour. Even though most of the customers had fled outside by then, and with all the mayhem, there was the danger of losing half a day just cleaning up the place.

  The radio taunted them with a cheerful concert of flutes and drums.

  “What could it have seen, I wonder?” the banker continued.

  “Can you be quiet, please?”

  Seluma approached Professor Moi, worried about his pallor. She had always seen him smile; a slight melancholy veiled his eyes from time to time, but it never troubled him deeply.

  She brushed his shoulder, a very quick contact so as not to risk ruining his jacket.

  But before she could say anything, a sharp sensation shook her. The familiar shortness of breath, the familiar inner thrust that stretched her body...

  All three now!

  As always. They supported each other. Sometimes, Seluma enjoyed their visits. But she absolutely hated it when they manifested in public.

  The pain clouded her vision, leaving her to navigate in a gray miasma, the voices of the others just disembodied, gurgling sounds.

  Luoth continued to babble, oblivious.

  “This is obviously nonsense. The trolley was the victim of a terrible accident that blew off some of its marbles. After all, what an idea to run so far. Couldn't it have gone to the supervisors?”

  Seluma closed her mouth tightly, folding his flesh inwards as much as possible, even retracting her telescoping eyes to keep from screaming. But now they were coming out.

  “The brains of these machines do not work on marbles,” pointed out a colorless voice that seemed to come from underground. It had to be Moi.

  “I know, smart guy!” the other replied, piqued. “It was a figure of speech. Anyway, in my opinion, it got its sentences mixed up. Poor thing, so distressed. It must have been something like, 'Oh, perdinciravola, the tunnel is closing! Everything is collapsing! Let's escape to the open space of Faspath! Alert!’ But the voice came out flickering, and we only heard bits and pieces. Funny, isn't it?”

  “It clearly said, 'Faspath is closing.'”

  “Utter baloney, you will agree. How could such a thing happen? The crash damaged it, so who knows how it went...”

  She felt them come out suddenly, overwhelmingly; with a liquid pop, two ovoid bulges on either side of her head. And the third, smaller and more elongated, made its way to the center of her back, just above the edge of her corset. The eye antennae also reappeared after an involuntary spasm.

  The old man in the beret, who was near her, instinctively jumped back with an agility that was unexpected for one holding a cane.

  Holes and spots appeared on both spheres in an arrangement that suggested the outline of a face, deformed, a rough sculpture made by a child with bread dough.

  “What have we here? How interesting!” croaked the left protuberance, now resembling a withered head. Seluma twisted around to plant what she hoped was a look of fire in his face.

  “This may be a joke to you,” the other head exhaled with a shuddering sigh. “Not good news, that's for sure.”

  And Seluma turned her own head almost one hundred and eighty degrees to give him a grimace as well. Then she straightened. She did not have to move at all to look around. Her peripheral vision was excellent, thanks to the independent optical antennas. A single eloquent gesture to both of them.

  Behind what could have been the back of her head, she felt a burning pinch, a tension from the small growth that remained amorphous and silent. It never spoke. But it cared enough to remind her that it existed.

  Seluma ignored it, as she always did.

  “Don't be afraid,” the banker said to the old man, who held his hand over his heart. “They are her husbands. Not that she ate them. That's their custom. When they get together, they mean business.”

  He had accompanied the explanation with strange gestures, shaking his fists above his head. The other man took off his cap.

  “If you have nothing useful to say, please leave and stop scaring my customers,” Seluma ordered, addressing the husbands, but Luoth and his friend froze in embarrassment, thinking she was angry with them.

  Whatever, she did not have the strength to explain herself better.

  The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  Marghi and Myriaky would not leave just because she asked them to. They never listened to her. Why should they? They had been roused from their dormant state by the most sudden emotions that had struck her, so if anything it was her fault for losing control by letting this absurd and grotesque incident upset her.

  Now everyone was watching her; every nosy onlooker in the neighborhood would be standing there to watch the quarrel.

  “A rift closing, a city crushed,” the second head continued. “I've heard this story before.”

  “And where would you have heard it without us?” interjected the other, too loudly and too quickly.

  “Marghi, don't play dumb,” Seluma admonished him quietly.

  “Of course, you were there! Don't you remember? Eh, remember where we were? Where?” Myriaky croaked, getting weaker and weaker.

  “Ah...”

  The first head made a rude noise.

  “From a reliable source!”

  Seluma was able to regain the thread of his peace of mind. The mugs, she had to think about the mugs. Her collection, the way she arranged them on the shelves, how relaxing it was to polish them one by one. How beautiful they were, all gleaming, each a slightly different shade, a little more greenish, or yellowish, or pinkish, or...

  The heads flattened out in a few moments, deflating as they reentered her body.

  The distant wail she heard was the siren of the fire department. But why were they honking? There was no emergency!

  When she looked back at the people watching her in silence, she saw an unamused Luoth with crossed arms, a professor with glazed eyes, and the air of someone who had just been slapped, the frog secretary still holding the folder with the banker's papers in his paws.

  “And what did that mean?” burst out Luoth. “What kind of story, what kind of crushed city are we talking about?”

  Seluma hardened her torso and straightened to tower over the small group.

  “But how should I know! If you want to help, I thank you; otherwise, continue your day and sober up out of here! Go on!”

  The intermittent siren cut off her last curses and dispersed the crowd.

  Those with business elsewhere —Moi, Luoth, and most of the patrons— hurried to the gaping, half-open double doors before the fire department or city security decided to cordon off the area. Onlookers from outside recoiled at the sight of the dark faces of those leaving.

  But look at the door, Seluma cursed; it will never close again.

  The damage was much less than she had feared at first. The thick glass had held up without damage. On the other hand, the whole panel was hanging crooked, warped, and some interlocking parts had come out of their guides. She had to call the carpenter immediately. The tables, the utensils, everything could wait, but she could not risk not being able to lock the entrance to her property.

  A cry of despair escaped her throat.

  The elderly patrons had quietly returned to the bar with the entertainer in the blue beret, but they were all sitting on their stools, smiling, waiting for the next show, one of them even whistling happily.

  Over the radio, they were interviewing someone who was talking about flowers.

  The waiters wandered around confusedly, begging her with their eyes to do something.

  Seluma hated her place and her own work at times like this —what did everyone want from her?

  But then she looked up at the ceiling of the gallery and saw the Pipers still hanging there, slowly opening and closing their black wings, their gaze directed at her but intended to pass her by, to look at the wreckage of the trolley lying on its side. One of the creatures flew down, landing on the remains of the tables, a muffled breath coming from its long snout as its paw grazed the dented surface of the dead automaton.

  This simple, calm reaction reconciled her to her world.

  Sometimes it was hard to put up with the stupidity of the people of Nelatte, but at least the animals were well-behaved.

  “You take care of that,” Seluma ordered the perfect maid, who whistled with excitement. “I have no time to waste.”

  °°°

  Dust.

  She herself is dust, every single grain. The thick layers resting on the crushed stone are her skin. The ground below, the veins of rock are muscle and bone, and the moisture condensed into droplets in the dark cavities of the granite is her blood. She lies huge and inert, divided between the two sides of the abyss, in the place where her kingdom once stood.

  Yet she can see everything, from the sky. No, from the void at the center of the chasm where her heart remains.

  A tentative whirl in the sand is the first movement, slow, uncertain. Then the whirlwind gains momentum, lifting the grains, one by one, from the rocks on which they lay, a whole curtain of dust emerging from the endless chasm, forming more and more compact, solid clouds.

  Her body writhes in the spasms of returning life.

  The fragments cement themselves together, larger and larger pieces quickly conglomerate, surrounding the more massive rubble, like children circling around adults to ask them to play.

  The two sides of the giant fissure come together again, merge, as whole slabs of stone rise from the broken edges of the pit, pushed by the ground that wants to rise, to reassemble itself, to erase this insane wound.

  The crack disappears, and she manages to take a breath that smells of grass.

  The grass, her fine hair, reattaches itself to the forming earth, covering the rock with a fertile, soft, undisturbed layer.

  There is still pain in all of this, but she is laughing, the screeching and thudding of the mastodontically moving masses is the very song of her joy.

  She is coming back. Just as she knew she would.

  The flowers lift their corollas, whole, never trampled. In a flurry of leaves and scraps of wood, bushes and saplings arrange themselves into abstract forms on the pathways.

  Columns point skyward, conjuring from the rubble a domed roof that creeps over them like a living thing. Where there was emptiness, at the center of the Rift that split the earth to its core, now stands a round temple of teal tiles surrounded by stone benches.

  And she, she barely feels a jolt before she stands on her pedestal and the last little pieces that make her up fall into place, drawing the details of her face, forming the fingers, the crown, carving the floral pattern in relief on the base of the pedestal on which her bronze feet rest.

  There is no one there. The gardens have long since been abandoned. Blades of grass sprout between the stones that pave the paths, disrupting their geometric regularity. The silence is deep, unnatural, broken only by a few puffs of air whispering through the leaves and the jingling of bells hanging from the pavilion columns.

  The animals have fled, even the birds and the crickets.

  The plants are the last ones left, those who have not lost faith to the end. The perseverance of those who have no choice, those who cannot move.

  Just like her.

  But now it’s over. All she has to do is wait and everything will start again.