All around us, Oblya gasped and panted like a woman in a too-small corset. Artisan schools and almshouses burst from between its ivory boning. An eye clinic and an electric station flowered up in two quick exhales. And then, at last, the ballet theater, with a breath that ripped the corset’s seams and exposed Oblya’s pale, heaving chest. Tourists walked from one of her bared nipples to the other, from the Yehuli temple to the onion dome of the oldest church. They gathered at the ballet theater in the valley of her breasts, right above her beating heart.
