In Bissandra, which lies along a lake so still it has forgotten which surface is its own, the sky is not finished. Each evening it resumes work: it draws waveforms, hangs small beaded chains from nothing, sketches flowers it will not commit to, and abandons all of it before dawn.
The inhabitants sit at the shore with their backs to this. They have learned that the sky stops drawing if watched, as a shy hand stops writing.
At the center stands the House, which is one wall and one door and one rainbow-colored shell, and which has stood unfinished for four hundred years. Travelers ask when it will be completed. The Bissandrans answer that it was never begun — it is simply the shape the air takes when a place is being imagined, and it will vanish on the day the imagining is done. They are in no hurry.
