In World City by I. F. Godsland

could watch some older boys practice careless, fluid gymnastics. He would try some of the moves himself when they felt like showing him.
    Dion’s parents talked incessantly about going to Europe. They seemed to think he would be as excited as they were. Dion’s grandmother went on taking him for walks as if nothing was happening. He waited for her to talk about the imminent change in their lives, but she held her silence. When he could stand the gap in her opinions no longer, he asked her outright what she thought about it all.
    Her old eyes were so expressionless he might have been talking to someone else. She looked around as if she had lost or forgotten something. Then she pulled out her clay pipe and prepared a smoke, lighting up and puffing on the peculiar smelling mixture with unusual force. Eventually she said, “What you know about World City, Dion?”
    He’d never heard of the place.
    She grinned wickedly and said, “Okay, I know you don’t know nothin’. Nobody around here know World City except maybe as some fancy words that smart peoples on the cable use when they want to be clever. But nobody really
know
the place. They don’t know the place no more than a fish know where the sea is. I know the place because I live outside of it. Maybe you get to know it too, young Dion. You got some sight so maybe you get to see round its corners like your grandma can.”
    She took a deep draw on her pipe. “So, you ask me, what’s World City?”
    Another puff, then, “I’ll tell you what’s World City, Dion. What I’m talkin’ about is the made world. The made world. Seen in thought and made in stone. You know the made world? Made like everything joined together, like on a map. That different from what I show you, Dion. There no map for what I show you. What I show you changes with the light, changes with what side of the bed you get out of in the morning. But not World City. No change like that there. World City – seen in thought and made in stone it is. Seen in thought and made in stone, so the thought be there forever and ever. And that stone, Dion, shiny as hell – pretty as hell. Just like those thoughts that make it. You see them every day, those thoughts. You see pictures of them. Big pictures. Rich-livin’ pictures. Pictures of World City. And the good World Citizens, they want to be in those pictures. They want to look like one day they go driving along that beach in that fine car looking like they goin’ to live forever, and looking like they come in through the front door and find this happy family smilin’ to meet them, and like those peoples who walk on red carpets and have others open doors for them. I tell you, Dion, that real sorcery. And powerful as hell. In a trance they are. A trance, I tell you. Because they only get to see the picture. They don’t get to
feel
what it like – you know? They don’t get to feel what it like to have been and done all the things you got to be and do to ride that car down the beach, looking like that driver, like you goin’ to live forever. All the little shit you got to drop. All the big shit you got to take on. All the power you got to get. All the parents you got to have. That the trick I tell you. That the sorcery. Put ‘em in a trance so they work for what things look like, so they work for appearances is all, an’ appearances is all they make. They work to make the made world, they do.”
    She took another deep draw on her pipe, “You know all this, yes? Sure you think you know all this. Every smart-ass college kid who don’t have to fockin’ work for his living think he know all this. I tell you he don’t know nothin’. Where he get his food from, eh? Where he get the freedom to think he know all this? And every smart-ass street kid who look at the peoples who’s the cogs and wheels of World City and thinks, not me man – he just