in life, expressing that he would take any gift the gods condescended to give him.
The woman came the next day and fed him. She noted the state of his ankle and slapped him on the head, one more bruise to teach him nothing. He was by then too exhausted to fight back or protect himself, though he would have rejoiced if the cruel man across the Dragon Bowl had jumped up and killed her. Instead the man snorted as if concurring that the boy was getting his just deserts.
Thus went his days. He sat unprotected in all weather, crouching to hide from the sun, lying flat in the curve of the bowl when the rains came and washed the dirt off all of them into the center of the bowl, where it drained back into the ocean. The floor of the bowl was tiled but he couldn’t understand what the tiles represented, if they represented anything at all, so many of them were missing.
One day a woman stabbed a man to death at the end of the beam and then leapt over the railing to her own death. The man, who had tried to assault her, died hung across the railing, watching his blood trickle into the sea. The next morning he’d been pushed off, too.
The boy didn’t have any idea how long he remained chained up. His leg festered and healed. The rain seemed to cleanse the wound, but rotted his clothes until they were tatters.
True to her word, the woman continued to bring him food. She seemed surprised by his tenacity. Every time she came now, she said, “I bet this is the last time I see you.” But he was always there the next time, emaciated and exhausted.
The food she brought seemed of a better quality then, as if she were so awed by his continuance that she was rewarding him. She touched him each time before she left, gently, almost tenderly. He couldn’t understand the look in her eyes.
One afternoon someone jumped off the beam. The boy leaned over the wall to watch the body drop to the ocean. He had only seen the movement of the jumper peripherally; he didn’t even know if it was a man, a woman, or a child. He might have jumped then, too, if it would have finished him quick; but he knew he would only have ended up dying slowly upside down, hung from the railing by the chain. It would also have called attention to him, and whoever hauled him back up would surely have beaten him again, or worse.
When the visitation finally came, he was asleep.
It was so silent and swift that he didn’t even stir. In his dream the world flashed white, scalding his eyelids. Something thin and tall spoke to him in a reedy voice, words that were not human language yet which he understood after a fashion, the syllables weaving through his brain, knitting together things that had never been united before, bits of thought that had never found a way to coalesce, words like a glue to bond the strips of parchment in the madman’s bundle.
He awoke to someone babbling nearby. The light of dawn gilded the Dragon Bowl through the spaces between the bollards. It lit the face of the man babbling beside him. He remembered the man from the day before, remembered that he’d been surly and greasy. Now the man stared with wide eyes, and his hair had gone white as clouds and sprayed out from his head.
The bowl itself had been transformed. The missing tiles had all been replaced, creating a colorful mosaic. On it lay a host of small objects, all clear like glass but flexible—containers and lids scattered about. The people who’d been sleeping on or near the beam scrambled out onto the bowl and began grabbing up the objects. Lids seemed to be the wrong size for containers, and the people combed through the scatter in a frenzy, tossing one and then another lid aside, shoving one another to get at the next, fighting over a complete container whenever a lid fit. The sealed containers seemed to have an effect on whoever held them, for anyone who made a lid pop into place immediately began to wail—more as if they’d lost something than in joy at completion of a task. Some struck those nearest them with the completed containers, while others collapsed and clutched them to their bosoms, rocking back and forth while weeping as if