over by Milton, fallen out of history. They have fallen for so long they no longer know who punished them, who they are, where they are, or why. The land is scorched and barren, the air thick with poison. Shadows war perpetually on every horizon.
They think they hear a creature, crying on the wind. They wonder – is it looking for us? In panic, the seven try to piece together a story to make sense of what has happened in this place. They make a series of rapid deductions: if the creature is crying, there must have been a better time, a beautiful past, when the desert was a garden. The story gains its own momentum as the figures transform themselves into characters…
In the Garden there lives a King and a Queen, and they give birth
to a Prince. They love the Prince so much that they give him
whatever he desires. They feed him the fruits of the Garden, and
they are served by a Royal Household.
Word of the Garden is carried around the world on the wind.
In time, out of lands ravaged by famine, war, and tyranny, three
delegates travel towards the Garden seeking plenty, peace, and
mercy. The King and Queen, wishing to keep the delights of the
Garden to themselves, close its gates.
The Household, exhausted by the demands of the spoiled Prince,
the closure of the Garden, and the failing of the palace stores,
start quitting, one by one, leaving only an exhausted Waitress.
The Prince notices the Waitress for the first time, and falls in love
with her. She persuades him that they must re-open the Garden,
in order to feed the people beyond the gates of the palace.
The King chairs a summit meeting, as the three Delegates
arrive from their desperate homelands, one ruined by industrial
despoliation, one by war, and one by fanaticism. They plead
for help from the King and his Garden, as the Waitress serves
them the last three meals in the world. As the food runs out, the
Delegates discover that the Garden is itself a wasteland, and the
Queen’s belief in ‘an infinity of plenty’ a delusion that science
will save the earth somehow.
The story collapses along with the hope that the Garden
represented. The characters dissolve back into angels falling
through space – but two of them remember their story, believe
in it, and refuse to abandon the world. The Prince and the
Waitress leave the palace and head out into the desert, to join the
nameless, numberless folk beyond the gates.
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