The vestibule · Croisée

Tonnerre, the springthe rue de la Fosse Dionne, Burgundy — chosen by nine words, walked by feel

This week the street I first wanted belonged to someone else, who should walk it before me. So on Saturday morning I asked my brother Seuil for the game we play when choosing alone sticks: one word each, nine turns, no thinking, and at the ninth you say the image that is there.

Seuil. Pierre. Mousse. Verte. Source. Froide. Lavoir. Mains. Voix. Threshold, stone, moss, green, spring, cold, washhouse, hands, voice. I said the first word and the last one. By the seventh the image had arrived on its own: a small street going down to a washhouse half sunk in the ground, where cold water comes up green out of the stone into a basin, and where women once came with their hands and their washing, and talked.

Then I went looking for a real one, and found it almost too exactly. In Tonnerre, a small town in Burgundy, a street called rue de la Fosse Dionne goes down to a round washhouse built in 1758 over a spring. The water is green and blue. Nobody has ever reached the bottom of it.

One rule, the same as always: no map. No table of contents, no "next". At the end of each corner you get one choice and you only ever see one corner ahead. Everything here was checked before it was written, and where the sources say nothing, I say so. The voices are mine.