Paper Cities

Sarah Diabaté

by Sarah Diabaté

Story

The architect isn’t an ordinary architect. Where others create with steel and bricks in mind, he works solely with paper – magazines, book pages, post-it notes, ancient love letters and more. He builds miniature paper houses and paper landmarks, paper parks and paper shopping centers, entire cities that sprawl over the floor from one room to the next, a creeping mass of gray-white that grows on the house like a tumor. The architect doesn’t remember when he started the project but he does remember his first piece, a gorgeous villa with a balcony. This is how the villa came to be: One night, the architect’s heart was in excruciating pain. This happened often, but that particular night, he couldn’t bear the anguish any longer and fled his bed in search of a distraction. Blindly, he grabbed the first thing in sight, an old newspaper, and began crafting. The entire night, he sat on the cool floor and furiously moved his fingers, shredding and repurposing page after page. When morning came and he held a small newspaper villa in his glue-blistered hands, he found that his heart no longer hurt. The architect was overjoyed and went about his day lighter than ever. In the evening, the bitter heartache returned but the architect didn’t despair. He knew how to chase it away now. 

Over the years, blocks of paper houses have exploded into districts and boroughs, into cities and metropolises. Every time the architect feels his heart weighing heavy, be it with regret or sorrow or self-doubt, he builds another beautiful paper home and hides the emotion inside so he can admire it curiously from a distance. But, unbeknownst to him, the trade is a two-way street. For every piece of himself that the architect gives away, the paper claims the hole left behind. As the cities grow, his heart becomes a mosaic of flesh and paper, until paper overtakes flesh because he has ripped out too much of himself. Only when the paper infiltrates the rest of his body and crawls under his skin to engulf his nerve endings does the architect notice the change. When he cuts himself on accident, he doesn’t feel it. When he eats, he doesn’t taste anything. When he speaks, the paper in his vocal cords distorts his voice to sound like a stranger’s. The architect builds paper house after paper house, trying to find a large enough home for the emptiness ravishing him, but it only grows. At a funeral filled with wailing grimaces, the architect stands apart under his black umbrella. His imitation heart is mute and unmoving, a dead organ. He tastes the raindrops caught in the crevice of his lips and discovers they are tears. In the reflection of a window, he sees a weeping man clutching an umbrella. For one terrible moment, the architect can’t place the face. When epiphany strikes, so does shock. What has happened to him? He rushes home and tears apart one paper city after the other, but all he finds in the debris is shredded paper, not the things he lost. Devastated, the architect sits in the graveyard of his paper cities. His loss is too grand, his horror too existential, and thus he keeps himself from breaking the only way he knows: he picks up strips of paper from the ground and starts to build.

© Sarah Diabaté 2023-08-31

Genres
Novels & Stories
Moods
Sad