Where Mannequins Stare

I grew up in a village. I can’t say which because they’ll come for me.

The streets are filled with glass and steel, long fingers reaching for the sun. Storefronts written in a dozen languages offering the newest electronica. If you lose an arm they’ll replace it for you the same day. You won’t notice the difference. It has always been there.

A thousand eyes can pass you but you won’t be seen. All their eyes are electrified glass, windows into the third sphere where time is irrelevant and history is a matter of opinion. An hour ago is old news. We are clamoring for a tomorrow we are not building and yearning for a yesterday that never happened.

Such is the way of nostalgia.

I ask my ------- about the village. They tell me about when the buildings were put there. They tell me about their grandparents, their childhood, then the story ends with me. I ask them where it all comes from and they stare at me, glass eyes blinking red.

“We have always been here.”

I walk down a wide street lined with concrete towers. The ground is covered with jade glass and marble walkways. Vendors wait patiently for the outdated and evicted to remove themselves so they can sell the wares of tomorrow. Timers countdown the new releases in video and music. Eyes are fused to screens. Pulsing LED fills my periphery and I notice the hoard of mannequins crowding around a stage where the prosthesis of tomorrow are being revealed; replace your organs today! Why use those outdated organics when you can be up with the t i m e s? The next step will be to go fully wireless. Digitize your consciousness and live in an all-inclusive resort in someone else’s imagination. Pay your rent just by liking, sharing and subscribing, or by appearing in targeted ads.

I walk for days in search of the street’s end. I pass city-sized towers, plastic trees and artificial turf, concrete monuments to ancient heroes of last week. I walk until my bones ache. The road loops around the globe and back again, but I stay on an unbroken concrete trail.

I pass the crowd again. The newest model has been released. Why use those outdated organics when you can be up with the t i m e s?

Again and again I pass the same familiar landscape. The features are unchanging, but every time the colours are different. They fade from bright neon to pastels, and finally to earthen colours. The whitewash of the concrete towers fade, crack and fall like flakes of lacquered snow. They gather around one of the trees next to a pool and I -

I smell something.

Not the cloying perfume of commuters on the bullet train or the burning meat from vendors, the steam from sewers or fresh tar being laid . I remember it from somewhere else. Somewhere bright. Some place where the lights aren’t turned off with buttons. It is coming from a park. I passed it several times but I never noticed the tree in the middle. It is tall and old and unkempt. Thin branches with spiky leaves are accented by delicate white pillows. I look up and see that the flaking paint from buildings and ash from factories is descending from the sky and turning into crisp, fresh snow. The crystalline ornaments are decorating the tree and outlining a circle around the fountain below it.

I have seen fountains in the thousands of malls in The City. They are made of brick and spray water from spires, statues or pillars. This has none of those. It is flat, solid, and sitting in the dirt. The water has turned to glass like everything else. It is nothing new. I turn to leave but the frigid winds push me towards the fountain.

But it is not a fountain, is it?

I look down at the cold, hard water. I look down at my own face. I look at the reflection of the cityscape. I turn to look at the buildings and they are there, reaching ever further toward the sky, their faces changing with the seasons, but when I return to the reflection they are gone. There are only small huts in clusters. Some are made of dirt, others are made of animal skins, still more are made from trees. Real trees with bark and sap and leaves that change colours and fall with the seasons. The villages are situated in the forest next to a pristine lake. The buds pop out of the branches and from them burst strong, green leaves, The leaves turn gold and scarlet, then fall to the ground in wet piles which are shortly covered in snow. The cycle repeats itself endlessly.

I turn to look for my village. It is obscured by concrete and steel but I know it is there somewhere, packed between others in a never ending ocean of pavement. In the cold glass I see an ocean of green, living and breathing, moving with the winds.

Then I see the people.

They are moving through the villages in clusters. Their mouths move in strange ways. They never look at their screens - I don’t even see LED boards on their buildings. They don’t eat from stalls. There are no lines for prosthetics. All their eyes glisten but I don’t see any glass among them. No prosthetics. No profiles.

Only flesh.

They all speak to each other, some in different tongues. They write their stories in different characters. Paper circulates among them and they nod or shake their heads. New faces appear, slowly at first, then roll in like the tides. The people turn to me with wide, terrified eyes. One winks coyly but the others have twisted faces expressing their horror. They hold their hands up to the sky and scream but no one answers them. Black clouds loom overhead. Thunder crashes and rain falls, staining the huts and longhouses. The homes, the villages, melt in the rain and disintegrate like sandcastles. The concrete fingers pierce the ground and reach up into the sky to challenge a god that did not answer the people’s cries.

The people fade like a ghost in the fog. The forests disappear, the oceans dry.

But the tree remains.

It was always here.

I run back into the city and scream. I grab every person I see and point to the lake. I point to the village. I point to the people. Some screens are lowered. Some eyes are narrowed. Some nod, some shrug. I look across the street and see mannequins staring at me with blank, expressionless masks. One puts a hand on my shoulder and says “you’re confused. There was never a village. There were never any people. This land was empty. We have always been here.”

I break away and run through the streets looking for the houses, the villages, the people.

Nothing.

I cry out like they did, I scream to the skies, to the people around me, I scream until the sun sets and the neon signs light the sky.

Silence.

I feel another hand on my shoulder.

“How dare you,” one of the mannequins says. “Why do you hate this city?”

I tell them what I saw.

“You’re confused,” they tell me. “You’re telling lies. You lie because you hate The City. You don’t know the truth. Like and Subscribe to find out the F A C T S.” It smiles at me with bright eyes, perfect teeth, and a pure complexion.

I run through the streets as far as my flesh will carry me. I come to another city with another tree and another lake.

There is someone looking in it. They see the people, the village. Their body recoils with horror when they see what I saw. They look around frantically, screaming to the skies, calling for anyone that will listen to look in the ice and see.

The mannequins appear. Their plastic hands slap flesh. I watch them load that person in a cage and drag them to a gallows. I watch them hang me.

I watch my feet kick and my batteries die.

I turn and run towards the horizon. I pass from city to city, from street to street. I see another lake.

And another.

And another.

And another.

Finally I stop because I don’t know where I am anymore. I have been running down the same streets on different lands for centuries. I know I can never go home again because it is not the same now as when I left it. I have new eyes. I would be living in someone else’s imagination.

I sit and I wait. I hope that when the rain takes me it is quick.

An old woman sits beside me. Her face is tired and her bones are weary. She looks to me and smiles. She points to the buildings across from us, waving a hand across the cityscape and says,

“I remember when this was all forest. I remember there was a village right there where I used to play with my parents, my siblings, and so many friends.”

I can barely find the energy to ask, “How? How do you remember?”

She winks at me. I see how she has aged since I saw her last.

“Because this is my home. I have always been here.”