When the City Washed Itself in One Heart

In a dream told through Sufi and surreal images, the narrator sees a city losing its shadow, where sunlight stumbles at doorways it cannot enter and a fountain at the center pours out dust, and he knows that thirst has wounded the meaning of water. He enters carrying a clay jar, and when his heart cracks, out come a face he once wounded, a promise he left dying at a threshold and a hand that reached for his and could not find it, while dust covers the names of those he failed. He sets out to find them name after name: he sits with a waiting mother and leaves his watch outside, returns to a hungry child what greed took on a tilted market scale, gives back the thread of gossip he had pulled from an absent man's garment, and removes from his argument against an adversary an old wish to humiliate him. With each act the water in the jar grows clearer and heavier, until he places an orphan's full due in his mother's hand without calling the city to witness, then pours the jar into the fountain and light can finally cross the doorways. He wakes with no jar and a person's name on his palm, a right long overdue, and understands that he must begin in his own room, with a right restored, a promise kept and a mercy willing to bear its own cost.