deviantgene

The twisted woman sat beneath the oak tree. You would always find her there, looking out at the world as if through the eyes of a mouse from its hole. She never spoke. Occasionally, one could see her reading a letter, but those times were few and far between.

Did I say the old woman never spoke? Well, that is not entirely true. She spoke once, her voice echoing through every room of every house and every chamber of every building. Here is what happened:

A street had lost its way. It was supposed to lead to a town, but it had completely lost its way, so now it led nowhere. A man had been shot, and there were murmurs that he was framed. His photographer grew on to be prosperous, but neither the photographer nor the man could prove the murmurs. Since then, the street had lost its way.

It was a young street, not very old. It went on for a few kilometers. The other streets were much older; they had been there since Roman times. Nobody knew who built this street, and when it rained its potholes often flooded. The other streets chose to ignore it, largely. So the street went to the old woman.

Now the old woman herself was once a town. The woman remembered what it felt like to have streets running through her like veins, to have houses nestled in her embrace like children. She had been a prosperous place once, with market squares that buzzed with life and church bells that sang through her mornings. But towns can fade, and she had faded until only her essence remained, compressed into the form of a woman who sat beneath an oak tree.

When the lost street approached her, something stirred in her ancient memory. She recognized in it the same confusion she had felt as her own streets began to blur and fade, as her buildings forgot their purposes one by one. She lifted her twisted hands from her lap for the first time in years, and that was when she spoke.

There was only one place where lost streets could find their way. The old woman knew of it. She had forgotten, of course, in the manner that the elderly know things but forget them.

“The Bazaar of Lost Dreams,” she whispered, her voice carrying the weight of centuries. “It stands where memory meets forgetting, where the cobblestones of ancient Rome still whisper to modern asphalt. Go there when the moon is a silver penny in the merchant’s palm. Look for the stall where they sell maps drawn in starlight, where the vendor’s eyes reflect roads that never were.”

The street trembled at her words, feeling its potholes fill with shadows of remembrance. “But how,” it asked, its question echoing through its empty length, “does a street walk to a bazaar?”

The old woman who was once a town smiled for the first time in decades. “The same way a town becomes a woman,” she said. “One forgotten step at a time.”

And so it was that a young street learned to fold itself like paper, gathering its length into the shape of a traveler’s footsteps, and set out to find its way in the Bazaar of Lost Dreams, where cartographers trade in possibilities and every wrong turn leads exactly where it’s meant to go.