The Overhead That Thought It Was Heaven

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There was an overhead in the city, though nobody could agree on what exactly it was. Some called it architecture. Others called it destiny. A few called it “management,” which was depressingly accurate. It hung above everything like a beautiful bureaucratic mistake: a curl of gold arcing upward, brushing a obedient piece of sky, as if wealth itself had gotten sentimental and wanted to pet heaven for a while.

Columns ran along the sides of the great building, marching endlessly outward like they had been told to go stand in formation and never, ever ask why. Past them opened a crystal-glass vista, a skyline ribboned with clouds that had clearly read the job description and were determined to look meaningful. The future was somewhere back there beyond the glass, but nobody could get a permit to see it.

To the right, a waterfall poured forever, as waterfalls do when people are too impressed to tell them to stop. It fed a great Strawberry—capital S, please—which bloomed in slow revolutions of impossible red. The Strawberry breathed out spores, polite little colonizers drifting on the breeze like cheerful pamphleteers, intent on binding everything into one ecstatic, sticky union. It was nature’s idea of customer outreach.

On the left, there was a wall from a city no one visited anymore. The city had been lonely, and finally decided loneliness was simpler if you just locked the door. Walls love clarity.

Between the wall and the waterfall stood a balcony, crowded with steadfast sprouts, each one peering outward with alarmingly human eyes. They weren’t suspicious. Just permanently thoughtful. They stared toward the Great Strawberry Host, who presided like a benevolent tyrant. He could see everything through his many channels, his awareness split like a man watching 10,000 televisions at once, all different, all urgent, all insisting they mattered most.

And of course, there were the people below. They went about their lives pretending this was normal, that cities always had cosmic produce and voyeuristic vegetation. They told themselves this must be progress. They said things like, “This is how it’s always been,” which, historically, is what humans say right before something very interesting or very stupid happens.

Still, the overhead hung there, the gold touched the sky, the columns stood, the waterfall whispered, the Strawberry dreamed of universal adhesion, the abandoned city sulked, the sprouts watched, and the Great Host flickered between realities.

And because this was a human place, no one asked the most obvious question:
What if none of this was supposed to be overhead at all?