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By Root 552 0

flag that would truly represent them would have to be a Penelope’s shroud woven and unwoven for someone who would never return, someone who had never been there. A banner as moving, as ever-changing, as ephemeral as the images under one’s eyelids before one falls asleep.

Through the archway and stained windows, colourful lights of all hues began to play more brightly, more wildly on the icicles of the fountain. Gabriel mumbled something to himself that Brentford could not make out. He came closer.

“The aurora, the aurora,” Gabriel muttered.

Yes. There could be no better flag.

Later, a thick, steady snow began to fall. Somewhere along Barents Boulevard, on the half-collapsed stands, the forgotten wax effigies of the Seven Sleepers had remained seated, slightly tilted, on the armchairs that propped them up. The surrounding street lamps gave a pale yellowish hue to their faces and a deep black sheen to their clothes, until the flakes dotted them, then covered them in patches, getting stuck in their beards and their eyelids. Their glassy eyes, faintly glinting in the gaslight, seemed to be all turned in the same direction: that of two small huddled figures sharing the same duffle coat, who stood in the snow, watching them in silence.

“And if any should like the world I have made, and be willing to be my subjects, they may imagine themselves such, and they are such—I mean in their minds, fancies or imaginations. But if they cannot endure to be subjects, they may create worlds of their own, and govern themselves as they please.”

Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle

The Description of a New World,

or The Blazing World, 1666