The world’s slowest elevator. A bizarre attraction, this lift, slowly lifting. It wasn’t the lift that drew the curious far outside the City of Fair Breezes to this modern alpine locale, it’s what the lift was rumored to do. That obscure purpose, no one quite knew.

There it stands, a tremendous building—even more tremendous than expected—its edges softened only by the rose gardens bleeding outward, to the pasture’s end. El Edificio, eye to eye with the mountains.

“Welcome, ladies and gentlemen.”

The bellman’s teeth, in that instant, share the exact sparkle with a glass of wine as it fills just beyond his shoulder, through the foyer, out the window. “To the top?”

“Yes.”

The elevator door closes and the bellman vanishes, as do the walls, liquefying, cerulean in tint.

All along the blurred terra, trees sway as if fastened to a seafloor. Stillness, to the unfocused eye, though time is always moving. As are the vantages, and the subjects: glaciers flatten to lakes, horses assume human shapes, roaming. No size is certain. No scene is complete. They press the button.

Ding.

Doors part on a valley, they exit, now spectators, as another party enters above. Themselves, before again, at another moment, in a tinted fantasia, in an instant.

Watching as the group ascends the aquatic shaft, passing again themselves—in their separate descent.

The City of Fair Breezes, as before it was again yesterday.

____

Native Eloquence is Los Angeles/Oberlin-based multi-instrumentalist Adam Hirsch. He’s currently recording with plans for a release later this year.

Dreams is an ongoing project where we ask our favorite artists to create a piece of music inspired by a handmade collage.