In the Shadow of the Dome

Beneath a cupola that seems to devour light itself, a cloistered city exhales secrets like incense. A widowed matriarch, gaunt as candle-wax, guards the last gasp of a crumbling dynasty inside a marble hothouse where orchids rot in silver bowls. Her daughter—skin luminous with rebellion—smuggles anarchist pamphlets under corset bones, while the son, fresh from Eastern seminaries, returns with eyes scalded by desert suns and a pocketful of heretical parables. Each dusk the dome’s shadow lengthens, licking alleyways where telegraph wires hum Morse lullabies to anarch cells. A governess with a voice of velvet arsenic tutors the children in gothic French, whispering that every saint was once a vandal. Into this chiaroscuro arrives a railway engineer whose theodolite measures not land but longing; he courts the daughter with blueprints of bridges that will never span the river, only her clavicle. When the matriarch commissions a cathedral of glass to entomb her husband’s bones, lime-whipped laborers—faces veiled in dust like penitent ghosts—revolt, hurling chandeliers into the kiln until the furnace vomits liquid constellations. In the ensuing conflagration the dome splits, birthing a cyclone of stained-glass shrapnel that tattoos psalms onto fleeing backs. The son, now stigmatic with molten shards, staggers to the river baptizing himself in silt and kerosene, while the daughter, astride a stolen locomotive, tows the governess’s corpse like a bridal train of soot. At dawn only the engineer remains, pocket-watch fused to his palm, counting heartbeats that echo the dome’s final sigh as it folds into its own silhouette, a fossilized lung exhaling the last syllable of a dead god’s name.