Tracers from the traffic
lights spread down vacated night streets, the outskirt city blocks swamped in
perpetual blue light. The lights don’t change now, not since they started to
glow like compressed ice, the soft beams crawling along the asphalt, stalking
up to shadows requesting caresses.
The headspace moseys
through the streets, along empty roads where cracks in the pavement blink and
eyelashes whisper and retract. The stars are blu-ray junkies, the standby
screen negotiating pinholes. Bars serve up blob glasses filled with water,
fizzing white effervescent tablets. In a world that deified gut rot and rushed
to a token remedy.
A boy stammers while
using hammers,
On his first
erection.
A seizure parade marches
in silence, ticker tape plasters soaking up the shower of spit. Every one of
them is covered in a bruise over the entirety of the body, and naked since to
dress amplifies their pain. The ones who clench out a piece of tongue feel a
relief sanctioned by a bandit nanny from long ago, who stroked hair and sang
lullabies about dead horses.
The headspace tracks
the byways and receives. Since the dissolution of the last kleptocracy a simple
lawlessness has crept the land, the few bodies left after the show too
saturated with content to function, tranquillised with themselves, as
individuals. They sit indoors, staring at the windows, lit up with the blue
light from the street, timeless and after dark.
The ghost disputes of
violent domestics emanate from inside brick homes, but the rooms are empty upon
entry, suburban mausoleums, all shady. The headspace wanders upstairs where the
blue light falls along landings, and the door to the main bedroom opens into a
nebula of countless whirling stars that are a memory to be kept forever.
Out through the
window now and floating above the paths, gingerly recounting days spent with
unsecured wrist bindings, daubed with cover girl warpaint. Past a glowing
cigarette end, disembodied, the exhaled smoke of an invisible figure forming a
churning ball which pursues until a foreign street.
The buildings are
taller and darker, and the doorways breathe. A woman, glowing from inside and
from every nude part, walks her freakish beauty along the centre line of the
road, against the black. She’s drawing herself away. Snails, feigning
hibernation, stick to her. She sways carefully, to leave them undisturbed,
attached.
Headspace meets the
beautiful woman and passes on by—over sleeping policemen where the surface is
black speaker, playing tinny breakbeats. Infrasound beckons, and a line of
faded child stars emerges from the noise, their sallow complexions a receptacle
for the inverse snobbery of underclass young adults who only exist in
megabytes.
A foghorn of such
spectral joy as to devastate the tired soul trumpets majestically from some
unreachable distance, filled with magic and sober melancholy. The city in
unending darkness stops to wither in response.
Rebecca Gransden lives on an island
and writes sometimes. She can be found on Twitter @rlgransden
and online occasionally at rebeccagransden.wordpress.com.
