crawling on recently covered asphalt, the gravel sticks to your elbows and cheeks. couple of specks of glass too thick to cut. tempered windows atomised.
i remember it, this 30 mile stretch outside my home. eventually, there was one car that kept going up and down. no driver, just stuck going up and down. sometimes i’d try to talk to it but it couldn’t hear. or barely could. couldn’t register fast enough. as it passed. sometimes i thought about stopping it, a roadblock, blow a hole in the hill behind the road, too much chance that would cause a slide that destroyed my house too though.
the stretch was built to connect two cities, at the midpoint of a century of daydream apocalypse. they had made the conditions, these cities, for their own devastation, and as it came it was mostly quiet but for startling flashes of violence, roads still getting shod, up to the day they stopped being useful.
i look up from my position reclined in the entigen’s comfortable lounger. they are there floating in their solution. they adjust a couple of wires and my vision is again of this crawling.
i’d wanted the stimulation of cold ground and the impressions that small stones make on your skin when pressed in by body weight. the smell of, chemical, i wanted to lick the ground but restrained that. and yet i wanted sensation to release me of all tension. it was vaguely erotic, and painful, and nothing that anyone else might understand as rational. no symbols and no language aside from that of bodily hunger.
the last time i’d done it, in the road i’d heard the car, miles off, so faint but up close, it was there. for a moment i wanted to lay, stuck still in a path i knew would be unswerving.
i took my crawling back to the house.
i crawled into bed, covered in gravel.
at some point i awoke, feeling stupid and rubbed it all off, showered and treated the grazes and mild cuts I’d gotten. i looked at my body, naked, wet, bruised, my hair long, straightened by the water weight.
the entigen stopped the memory there. they then brought the recliner up. it was done and the distraction of my own story was enough to take away the fear. on my arm now, a tattoo of the band logo of ‘Vermin Crime and the Sluts’. cool.
GlitchOut 