The Tale of the Flat Land People

Gypsy Lou spoke:

There was once a people living together on a very Flat Land. There was not a hill in sight and the only limits to the rolling horizons were the fences and walls that clearly showed who owned which piece of Flat Land. Everyone lived in small, square houses with walls made of glass so that they could see anyone who might be sneaking up on them. Every family always kept one person on patrol, scanning in each direction with powerful binoculars.

Of course, there was fuck all to see as everyone's house and fenced off Flat Land looked exactly the same. And that was just fine by everybody as nothing different meant nothing new and they could just carry on being just the same without worrying about it.

Okay, the nights made them a little nervous as, when the moon insisted on deserting them in darkness for half the month, they had no idea what was going on out there. For all they knew, there could be mountains erupting in the middle of their cucumber patches and deep craters swallowing theirgolf courses. Every morning they awoke in a cold sweat. They’d jump up with a panic that would fade the moment that they saw everything was as Flat as it had always been.

In Flat Land everyone had one son and one daughter. In every garden there was a small, square kennel with a big eared dog living inside of it, listening out for anything unusual. All the men kept short brown hair and shaved at the same time each morning. The women had long brown hair and spent an hour in front of the mirror when they woke up. Everyone tried to look and act just the same as everybody else. It wasn't hard to be in fashion.

The grown ups went to work five days a week and the children all went to school. Nobody was ever late. Even the weather took especial care to be the same and if the weatherman with the short, brown hair told them it was going to rain, then it rained. No one was ever caught out.

Things became so much the same that no one bothered to name their streets or number their houses. No point in standing out - It might look like you had something to hide.

And so after some time of this, no one made any special effort to return to their own homes in the evenings. One house was much the same as another and so they just came back to the nearest home to hand. With their Flat Hearted good nature, everyone made sure the gaps were filled in each evening. And no one made a fuss if they ended up with an extra husband, daughter or dog.

I know what you’re thinking - A prime site for testing nuclear weapons. But wait - Redemption is at hand.

And sure enough, one morning at breakfast as the Flat Landers were sitting in their square houses, eating square lumps of cereal in front of square boxes boredcasting reassurances that everything was the same, there came a news flash. This was a new word to these egits - they didn't like the sound of it and turned off their square boxes in defiance.

And so the Flat Landers were completely unprepared to deal with the changes of that morning. The buildings of Flat Land had become so dog-shit bored that they'd begged a passing gypsy to give them feet. Being learned in the occult this was a piece of piss for her and she could not refuse anyone’s yearning to wander. She smiled as she watched them all swop positions during the night.

Everyone set out into the streets to begin their day and were all instantly lost, though they did their best not to show it. They drove to work in exactly the same places that they normally did, bravely ignoring the fact that they were walking into entirely different buildings.

The doctor found himself prescribing books for people at the library, the carpenter designed well-built, if tasteless, wedding cakes and a salesman tried to sell building site bricks and cement to anyone passing by. The teacher did at least find that his pupils had come to the same place as him - But after they had taken their seats in their cells, he realized he didn't have the keys to let them out.

The next day was no better. The buildings took an evil delight in uprooting themselves in the dark hours. Even the homes of the Flat Landers joined in. Everyone shook with terror in their beds as they felt their houses betraying them after so many years of tasteful decoration and paint work.

They opened their curtains the next morning and screamed - they were halfway up a huge mountain. No one could keep their balance on the slopes and most just hid in their beds. The next day they woke up next to the sea and could not for the life of them understand how a surface could move like that - right in front of their eyes. Some of them kicked the bucket straight off from the shock.

Over the next year, they started the day in deserts, by lakes or in the foothills by thundering rivers. Even when they stayed still for a few days or weeks, the houses and buildings kept in shape by jogging around all day. The Flat Landers had to make running jumps just to reach the corner shop and buy a newspaper.

Beyond the reactions of shock and fear, the sudden variety of events meant that for the first time everyone began to have different experiences. Some were less fortunate than others and, by the time they finished pulling out their hair, they stood out from the others. People started to develop a sense of identity, to be individuals apart from the common crowd and to be proud of it. Before long they had named and numbered their houses.

The little square boxes in the houses no longer came close to describing what was going on and only the old folks held on to the Flat reality flashing in front of them. In these strange times, everyone just developed their own ideas about what was normal and trusted in their own example.

And, of course, everyone learnt to adapt. On a still day, teenagers sold freshly drawn maps of the town's layout since the last upheaval. And when the buildings were chasing each other about the place, the same youths worked in teams to keep an eye on the current flow, acting as guides for the lost and fucked-up.

Flat Land faded to some hazy memory. The old people and priests whispered tales of the old days as a Paradise from which they’d been thrown out for some terrible sin. But no one really listened - truth be told, they’d come to like the uncertainty of not knowing where they were waking up or what would happen that day.”

Chapter 21