The wall of the city is made of glass, smooth and clear, slippery and strong. The stranger and his dog wear a path outside it every day, watching, listening, waiting to be ready.

The wall is about three times the stranger’s height, perhaps a bit taller. As perfectly crafted as the glass is, it is thick enough to cause some distortion when approached anything but head-on. The stranger never looks through the glass directly. He is always circling, always half-turned away from the way the light bounces off and shatters back into a thousand rainbow shards in his peripheral vision.

The language they speak in the glass city is not so different from the language of the city the stranger grew up in, where the wall was made of carefully pruned trees—though the words tug on his ear differently. The first time he heard it, someone at the gate was offering him a knife, holding it out like it was one of their famous apricots, like it was a welcome.

He didn’t take the knife. He started his path around the city instead.

The next time he heard their language, a group on the other side of the wall was shouting, perhaps at him, their voices overlapping and unintelligible. He could see them gesturing out of the corner of his eye, but he didn’t turn, couldn’t bear to know if they were speaking to him.

Now when voices float over the top of the wall, he pauses for just a moment, concentrates, trying to pull the meaning through and into him. Some concepts are the same—he catches play and eat and wait and learn as easily as he catches the sun on his skin in summer—and some are so strange to him that he gains no purchase, has no idea where to begin.

He supposes it is related to the fact that the residents of the city live inside out.

The stranger hasn’t looked at any of them directly, but he knows it’s true. They wear their organs like garlands of flowers around their chests and shoulders, and the red-pink-yellow open smear of them is visible through the glass even sideways. Sometimes they bleed, but if so there is always someone there with them, pressing in salve or gauze with gentle hands, wound to wound.

The stranger and his dog, Belén, sleep in front of the gate most nights, so he sees the residents struggle and twist and wrench themselves right-side in before they exit the city to travel or parley with traders, grimacing and patting at their skin like it’s foreign to them.

So too does the stranger see the people who approach the city, their clothes and skin dusty from the road, their hands reaching eagerly for the promises perched behind the wall—of openness, of kindness, of freedom from want. He sees the knives they are presented with, sturdy and purposeful. He watches most of them step back, drop the knives, retreat to the hard, dusty road and the hurt they already know. There are a few who are stronger or braver or more desperate than the rest. They take the knives. They set the point at their throats and cut a straight line down through their belly. They hold the edges of their skin and wrench them open, pushing themselves out and through, until they are nothing but flesh and organs and teeth, until they are an open wound, vulnerable to the slightest pain or irritation. And the gate of the glass city opens, and the people inside welcome them.

The city stands in the middle of a plain, flat and grass-covered. In the summer, wildflowers break out in patches of color. There are a few trees in the direction of the river and an elegant aqueduct bringing water down from the far-off mountains on the other side of the city. The river is small, and the water is always brown, but Belén loves to run toward it, or toward the little areas where water flows off the aqueduct. The water from the aqueduct, from the mountains, is supposed to be purer, better for the delicate residents of the glass city, but Belén dances in any water, all joy.

The stranger indulges her. Sometimes they spend whole days by the river, catching fish and reveling in the spray.

But the stranger always turns back toward the city, and Belén always follows.

The stranger walks around and around the glass city, and months go by, or perhaps years. His beard grows long. Belén develops a grey patch under her chin. The stranger begins to understand the language of the city, in which “out” means twelve different things, including “in,” and in which “touch” means “kill” and also “give name to,” and in which every word attached to goodness and benevolence comes from the root that means “open.” The stranger understands these things about the language, through the language, but he knows still that he does not understand it in a way that is true. If he understood it, surely he would take the knife for himself.

But he stops now to listen when the voices leap over the wall. He pauses, sometimes sits, and puts his hand on Belén’s head. Lets his fingers sink into the fur there, rubs the skin just behind her ears. The people in the glass city speak in layers of kindness to each other. Their words land softly; their phrases caress. In the glass city, fathers peel fruits for their sons, and daughters cut the crusts off the heels of the bread for their mothers, softness a gift passed between them. The stranger sees and hears it all.

This is how he knows he does not belong in the glass city. There is something heavy inside him, something so malignant and poisonous that to expose it to the air, to other people, would be nothing short of evil. When he imagines what it might look like, it is like a sharp black stone somewhere behind his ribs, weighing him down, infecting his heart. If ever he tried to join these good, gentle people in the city, he knows he would only harm them. The stranger has never belonged—not in his home city, not in the bands of people traveling the roads between walled cities, nowhere where people have to put up walls and climb over them with words and actions. He has never mastered the art of connection. His words only ever escape his intentions, only ever wound. The people of the glass city are so vulnerable.

That doesn’t mean he doesn’t want it. Sometimes he wants it so much it feels like it’s eating him from the inside out. When that choking, gnawing loneliness rises up in his insides, or his outsides, whichever it is, he has Belén, who speaks no gentle words but has soft eyes and warm fur and who never shies away from a gentle touch. Belén, who will never discover the horrible, rotten heart of him and turn away.

It is for Belén, the stranger tells himself, that he cannot regret not entering the city. Perhaps he might be selfish enough to put the knife to his own chest, to turn himself inside out and try to live softly and happily in the glass city, however it may hurt the others there, but he knows he could not look his dog in her brown, trusting eyes, and do the same to her. No matter if it wouldn’t hurt her. No matter if it was for the best. So the stranger circles the wall of the city and holds on tight to what he has.

The stranger and his dog sleep curled up around each other under the shelter of the empty market buildings outside the gate. Belén hunts, and they otherwise subsist on the heels of bread and fruit peels and the skin of animals discarded by the butcher. The stranger does odd jobs for merchants outside the city sometimes, receiving payment in food or goods or the occasional coin.

Is the stranger happy? Living so close to a paradise, if it is a paradise, that he does not understand? Perhaps not. But neither does he want to leave.

The trail around the wall is smooth earth, now. Sometimes new arrivals to the city join the walk for a few days before they take their turn with the knife or turn back to where they came from. None of them speak the stranger’s tongue, and they are not yet familiar with the language of the glass city; this makes it easier to avoid speaking to them. The weight in the stranger’s chest hangs heavier day by day. He begins to fear that even speech would reveal the horrible truth of him. He smiles and keeps his distance.

The arrivals always leave eventually. The stranger and Belén find a heap of apple peels and apricot pits, soft straw, a den of plump rabbits.

They live.

One morning, the stranger wakes up cold. He sits up, fingers tightening on Belén’s fur—cold.

Cold.

Still.

The stranger curls back down, presses his wail into fur he’s kissed a thousand times.

In the city the stranger grew up in, they burn their dead. In the glass city, they take them to the rocky hills approaching the mountains and leave them for the vultures, their open insides still outside, defenseless against beak and claw. The stranger does not want Belén to disappear into smoke and ash, into the belly of a scavenger. He thinks maybe in the earth she will be safe.

The stranger belongs to no city and no one, now that Belén is dead. He convinces a trader to loan him a shovel, his despair and desperation apparent, and leaves his last coin as collateral. He walks around the city, Belén in his arms.

He chooses a spot a quarter of the way around the city from the gate, where there’s a view of the river. He digs. His shoulders pull and burn; his arms ache and ache.

When he finishes digging, he will have to deposit Belén in the hole in the ground. He will have to leave her there, alone, forever.

He climbs into the hole and keeps digging.

Near sunset, something falls to the ground near the edge of the hole. Then another. The hole is so deep that the stranger hears them before he sees them, but after the second object lands, he hoists himself up and settles on the side, cushioned by a pile of fresh dirt.

There is a cloth-wrapped bundle next to the sweet awkward lump of Belén’s body. A few steps away is an apricot, yellow against the darkness of the upturned earth. When the stranger unwraps the cloth bundle, he finds a bone.

It’s a perfect bone. Scraps of meat still on it; not too thick but not too spindly either. It comes from something much bigger than the rabbits Belén had to subsist on for so long.

The stranger puts the bone in Belén’s mouth, careful with her jaw and the tooth that’s been bothering her. He takes her in his arms—exhaustion dragging them down—and places her in the bottom of the hole. He arranges her into a circle, like she’s sleeping in front of a fire, and adjusts the bone in her mouth. He puts a hand to her head one last time and then makes his way out of the hole to pile dirt on her grave.

Only when that is done does the stranger turn back toward the wall, to the people who are standing on the other side of it, looking back at him with eyes that bulge out of unutterable faces. There are three of them. The one in the middle is smaller than the other two. A family.

The stranger looks at them head on. Light streams horizontal through the glass wall, and it illuminates them perfectly. They glisten, shimmer where the glass distorts. The pink of their intestines and the dark red of their kidneys look almost decorative. The stranger looks at the lungs of the child, at the barely discernible in-and-out movement of them. He sees a piece of gauze stuck to the shoulder of one of the adults and shudders. He wonders what they would have to cover him in, if he dared to expose his ugly insides. The poisonous stone in his chest is so heavy he fears it will drag him down to lie beside Belén.

And they are so vulnerable to it, all of them. So very open to pain.

He could speak to them. Should speak to them, to thank them for the bone, for the apricot, for their kindness. He knows the words, however rough they would sound from his mouth.

The stranger wonders if they can possibly understand what he is feeling. The grief, yes, and with it the loneliness. He feels it coming for him like a storm front. In the glass city, surely loneliness can be brushed off like the pain of a knife point. These people have only to reach out a hand, to open their mouths the way the stranger is failing to do now.

He doesn’t know if they were born here, inside out from the beginning, or if they were the rare success story at the gate. He doesn’t know if the one on the left, the tallest one, put the knife to the throat of his wife, put his hand to the open edges of her skin and helped her turn herself into something that felt everything. If he looked into the eyes of his child and told her to tilt her head up just so—so it wouldn’t hurt, or so she wouldn’t see it when it did.

The stranger wonders if it was worth it. He watches as the child takes another apricot out of the bag at her feet and hands it to her father. Her father, who has no visible fingernails. He pulls a knife out of the same bag and puts it to the peel. This apricot is fully ripe, the color so full an orange it is almost pink. The knife is a little too big for the job, and the father winces when it punctures too deep too fast and lets out a small spray of juice. He continues peeling and slicing the apricot with careful movements. He hands sections of the fruit to his child, saving one slice for his wife, and then turns back to the wall, to the stranger, and nods. After a moment, he holds up the knife in his hand, gestures to it. Then he throws the knife over the wall—to one side of the stranger, but close enough for the message to be clear.

The stranger knows by now that this, too, is a kindness to them. The blade of the knife is the best welcome they have.

He nods his thanks. He wraps the knife and puts it in his pocket. The apricot is large, the size of his fist, but still hard, unripe. He puts it in his pack.

The stranger walks and walks around the glass wall of the city. He doesn’t look inside often because he knows what he’ll find.

The stranger walks around the glass city alone. The space by his right leg is always empty, and his bedroll around the fire is always cold. There is a knife wrapped in cloth in his back pocket and an apricot growing softer by the day nestled in the top of his pack. He visits the spot overlooking the river every day, and it doesn’t help.

As the stranger walks, the sharp toxic thing inside him, the stone as he thinks of it, gnaws at everything, grows and grows until there is nothing left to feed on, until he feels hollow instead. He thinks perhaps he has been left cavernous instead of poisonous.

There is a knife in his pocket that he is still afraid to use.

Sometimes he wants to ask them if it hurts, if he could still hurt them. If the hurt is worth it. In all his years, he has never spoken to anyone within the city. The glass wall is still between them. He respects it. He would not want to shatter the peace or the life that they have.

He begins to conjugate.

Belén is gone and has been gone and will be gone.

This is to say, he speaks aloud. Not in the language of his people, which he has not heard or spoken these many years, but in the language of the glass city, which he is beginning to think he understands.

The stranger walks his long, circular path around the glass city, and he speaks of the color of the sky, of pruning the trees of the wall of his own city, of his dog, who was perfect and soft and beautiful. He speaks of the thing inside him, that was so sharp and heavy and now might only be a ghost of something. The wind through the tall grass answers him. So do the birds, sometimes.

One evening, before it grows cold, he takes the apricot out of his bag. It has grown softer over the weeks, and now it smells sweet and almost acidic, on the verge of overripe. The color is a brilliant orange, and the skin is a little fuzzy when he rubs his thumb against it. The blade of the knife slices through that skin smooth and so so easy; the flesh of the fruit opens soft and beautiful.

The juice is sweet and sticky, running over his hands. He bites recklessly, sweet soft flesh on his tongue, until he hits the pit. The pain of it echoes through his teeth; the edge of it is so sharp it almost cuts his tongue. It shakes something in him. He laughs to himself—how long since he laughed aloud?—and licks juice off his wrist.

He finishes the fruit slowly, more carefully. It is no less delicious.

In the morning, perhaps he will describe the fruit to someone. Perhaps he will find that family lingering by their patch of wall and thank them with words they can understand. Perhaps he will approach the man who stands at the gate with the knife to welcome travelers and ask him about the best fruit he ever had.

If he walks a little closer to the glass wall, if he only keeps speaking—perhaps someday soon someone will hear him, understand him, speak back.

 

(Editors’ Note: AnaMaria Curtis is interviewed by Caroline M. Yoachim in this issue.)

© 2026 AnaMaria Curtis