In Salemo, virtually the entire populace is kept in drudgery and toil. There are no public parks, nor libraries, nor song, nor wine, nor holidays. People slave away in seventy-two-hour workweeks, sustained by unnourishing meals of corn meal and grease, returning home to their miserable hovels at the end of each day to collapse on their stinking cots. All this, to provide for a single child who resides in the golden castle at the center of the city, who in all its life has never known a second of discontentment or deprivation or fear.

From the moment of its birth, its every whim and necessity has been anticipated and provided for. It can speak a dozen languages, can masterfully ride, either bareback or with harness, any steed from the stables (though it favors the chestnut gelding), composes melodies for the harpsichord and violin that are at once playful and profound and strikingly original. It cannot conceive of an existence separate from beauty. It is perhaps the only fully-realized human being in the entire world.

One day, it is said, the inhabitants of Salemo will rise up and overthrow the tyrant child, tear down its golden castle, and in its place raise up instead flourishing green parks and public libraries and song. The child will be locked away in a dismal cellar, fed on rations of corn meal and grease, and left on display for anyone to gawk at, a living monument to the misery it once inflicted upon so many. On that day, parades will sing throughout the land, flags will flutter in the breeze, and bells shall send the swallows soaring. From that day on, the city will know unimpeded joy.

• • • •

In Moslea, they have begun to worship the child down in the cellar. They consider it a god, and claim that its cries and whimpers are expressions of a divine resignation; that behind its squeezed-shut eyes it sees visions of the blessings it bestows upon so many; that its suffering is holy, and that through it all suffering may be made holy; that there are virtues beyond the mere easement of suffering and the pursuit of joy.

In Moslea, they have begun to envy the child down in its cellar, and subconsciously seek to emulate it. Each citizen of Moslea inwardly thinks of themselves as bearing a great weight, a great suffering, and feels their existence made all the more profound for it. Those who look upon the painted walls and perfumed processions and sparkling flags of Moslea see only the façade of the great city, and not the inner sorrow that is its true reward.

• • • •

In Amelos, there are no children suffering in basements. The city is prosperous, with a robust welfare state and well-funded child protection agencies. There are, however, many, many children suffering in their sister city of Solema, just across the river, which has suffered a severe economic downturn in recent years.

There is no causal relationship between the suffering of children in Solema and the prosperity of Amelos, which is to say: if every single abused or neglected child in Somela were somehow magically loved and cared for and made whole, Amelos would continue to prosper. Nor the reverse: the sudden disappearance of Amelos’ good fortune would not ease the suffering of a single Solemian child.

And yet there is an argument to be made that all things are interconnected inextricably, and that perhaps there is an indirect causal relationship yet to be discovered—that everything is responsible for everything else. It is in this spirit that the people of Amelos go about their lives grateful for the suffering of the poor Solemian children, who on clear days may be seen across the river, scrounging through the junkpiles in their calloused feet and ragged clothes.

• • • •

In El Soma, they are making great strides in the field of child suffering. The peace and prosperity they enjoy has afforded ample opportunities for research, and bred generations of ethicists and vivisectionists and physicians who have applied their inquisitive minds to the task.

Current methods involve neglect rather than abuse, minimizing anyone’s direct culpability. Promising avenues for the future include electroconvulsive amnestic treatments; children who, through some inborn trait or another, inherently lead lives of suffering through no outside intervention; research into the minimum neurological capacity required to experience pain.

Researchers in El Soma are confident that within the next decade, they will have produced a child with such diminished brain function that the indistinct nightmares and sensations that torment them over the course of a lifetime will in sum be less intense than the pain you or I might feel stubbing our toe. By simply lying comatose, insensate to any bedsores or muscle atrophy, their vegetative existence might sustain the joy of an entire city, scarcely more cruel than growing grain to harvest crops. More such children might be produced, allowing for the perpetuation of more cities. In time, every household might have a child of their own.

• • • •

In Los Mea, they will tell you frankly that their so-called utopian city has been achieved primarily through subtraction. Certainly, they have festivals, orgies, flowers and song, but we could arrange these things for ourselves if sufficiently motivated. The most remarkable features of Los Mea are its deficiencies rather than its accomplishments. They are blissfully free of soldiers, slavery, organized religion. They serve neither a stock market nor a king. Any city could be Los Mea, they will tell you, with enough of it pared away, like the sculpture waiting to be excavated from the stone.

Maintaining the culture of Los Mea requires a certain temperament, its citizens admit. A certain complacency. There is no room for militant self-righteousness, for those who would let the perfect be the enemy of the good. That is the true purpose of the child in the cellar. Those who protest against it would have found some other flaw in the city eventually: an inefficiency, an untapped market, an unfilled space. Those who remain in Los Mea are the accepting, those who bear the knowledge of its suffering with grace and gratitude. The ones who walk away from Los Mea are perhaps more essential to its construction than those who remain.

• • • •

In L’asome, they simply do not believe in the child down in the cellar. The whole thing strikes them as blatant metaphor. An evocative illustration of a reality we all share. Surely you know of such a child, whether locked in a cellar or huddled somewhere beneath an overpass. Multiple of them, certainly. Abused children, hungry children, neglected children. In your neighborhood, in the next town over, across the border, in some impoverished nation halfway around the world.

They are everywhere, these children. You don’t think about them, mostly. If you did, it would steadily eat away at your quality of life. It would weigh on you like a boulder. It would make you that much less capable of helping anyone. It would let guilt within the walls.

So there is no child trapped in a cellar in L’asome. It is a city of utopians. They have the imagination necessary to conceive of prosperity not built on exploitation. Their city has been made glorious by a commitment to human dignity and the upliftment of all. When their children come of age and venture down into that dark cellar the first time—why, it could be anything huddled in the corner, hunched over and misshapen, making incomprehensible noises. It barely moves, if at all; it resembles no human they have ever seen. Those spindly struts jutting from its frame might as well be broken sticks or bones or puppet limbs.

Children imagine they see another child, but such is the self-centered innocence of children. Once back up in the sunshine, the gloom and fearfulness shall be dispelled, and there will be songs to sing and races to run and a whole bright world to discover. They will make a surreptitious accounting of their playmates and be assured that no one has gone missing. The shadowed figure will recede in their imaginations as they streak across the grass, becoming less and less substantial. Already, their innocence is fading. Soon they will not believe in it at all.