In a faraway city, every person lived alone at the top of a small, steep hill and never went down. Each house was equipped with carabiners and baskets to lower goods and waste to the ground. Even the birds feathered their nests in only the highest branches. In soggy weather, one could reach out a hand and touch the bottom of a cloud. One day, a curious woman clambered to the ground. She felt the rain, slick on her skin, and plunged her hands into the rich dirt. Her feet moved over the flat field. She began to dance.
*
A lone woman danced across a flat field, her feet shuffling in a joyful rhythm. Her pale skin was slick with rain, moons of black earth wedged beneath her fingernails. She once thought it was best to live in the clouds, to greet the birds on their high branches as her only neighbors. Her whole life, she had known only sky and met her basic needs from the window of a house at the top of a steep hill. It had always been this way in the city where she lived.
*
Each house was at the top of a hill, raising and lowering everything by rope and pulley. Outside the windows, only aeries and clouds. One woman went down to earth. It was raining, and she moved across the flat land, dancing.
*
In a dream, I lived in a faraway village in a small house at the top of a steep hill. There were neither stairs nor trails to enter or exit, only a system of pulleys and ropes on which I lowered my waste and my empty baskets to be filled with supplies once per week. The basket fillers, granted this power by the local authorities, were the only ones allowed onto the ground in small intervals. They reported some unspoken danger on the surface, claimed it better to stay isolated up above, with only the birds in the highest branches as neighbors. The clouds loitered so close to the windows that I could touch them, and the sky, when it was clear, glowed luminous, casting its light upon my bed, stuffed with eiderdown. Though it was beautiful, I wanted to know what it was like below, so one rainy day, I clambered down a rope and let my bare feet touch the dirt. The air smelled of pine, and the rain on my skin was the finest silk. I pushed my hands into the earth, the rich loam sticking to my fingers, and something in me changed. My feet began to move, the house at the top of the hill forgotten. I twirled and skipped and whirled, each undulating step startling and free.
*
Every person lived in a large box on a square of land. Each one ate, slept, dreamed, and wept alone, relying on the delivery of items to keep them isolated and safe. Each one received news from a small device that was tuned to one channel. The inside of the box was painted with sky, and trees, and birds to remind its inhabitant of the world that existed outside the box. One woman escaped, pushed through the packing tape, and stood on a lawn lush with spring green. She saw so many boxes, each one the same as hers. She put her ear to them and heard an echo of her own life. She walked away, down a street lined with boxes, looking for a place with new shapes. A bird sang from a branch, and her legs began to run.