Another law passed today in Pool: no one can sit around the bell tower. Last year it was the nuns, instructed to make maps from what their students left behind, so they vanished along with the maps they made. The people of Pool were stunned; some even spoke out of turn, upset with nothing but the face of facts torn off the face of laws. The town is now without its nuns. There is no telling when a woman will dream of becoming one. There is no telling how the people will react to the new law.

You may ask about the tree stump just off the square. It was once thought to be a meeting place of messengers. Now often enough one can catch the albino girl dancing on it just before sundown. The newspaper here folded long ago. Maybe a fraction of the boys still collect them for the idea of experiment.

In Pool the women all look at you with their bodies until you hint at your failures and intentions. The wives are all new; and on several occasions severed their hands while working in the gardens. Just outside those gardens, over at the Sycamore, the mayor once adjusted the tie of a dead school boy.

We needn't speak of the thievery that goes on, in and out of mirrors, smoke lost into the many pockets of sickly looking men. The legends are near enough, reflected in the tokens showing up in other towns.

Just yesterday one asked why no street names, and another, why no streets. All the men around us held brochures to a flower show; they just shrugged with the exception of one. He muttered how supper was getting quite cold—quite cold, he repeated, on a table miles away.

In Pool the children burn their flags which—when flown anywhere but there—are white. Some have mistaken them for the edge of sky.

Now it is easy to forget how there the locksmith is laughed at, thought useless even, as we say of some of our own. And its artists are never their own. Those who do come to stay for long periods offer various charms to the people of the hills. The depictions of Pool are always scratched onto glass brought over from the artist's homeland.

One of the most celebrated artists represents Pool as a space on several trains, and every train is leaving for the other's destination. Of course the engineers of Pool take themselves seriously. It is decided that when there is a collision this artist will be found on one of those trains.

About the schoolmaster, it is no secret that he inherited a fortune. Some think he descended from the great rhetoricians who passed through here before the gates went up. Scholars have argued that this doesn't even make for conjecture; it comes, they say, to pure riddle.

All one could find in the library off in the hills are the law books of other lands. And these are checked out invariably. In Pool all one has to read is others reading, for there are countless stories told in the placement of a book in a traveler's lap, endless fables in the way a woman's eyes fall on a question mark, volumes in the single turn of a page.

Before the new law, the people would gather around the bell tower; they'd take turns ringing it. The line would double in size by noon and double again as evening came on. People crammed into the alleys, wrapped themselves around their homes, and stretched out into the hills; the line would end with the smallest always, her back pressed firmly into the gate. If she made a sound it was lost to the sounds made by those waiting with her. The bell can be heard just outside the gate—any further, its sound is no longer that of a bell.