Fiction: EMBRYOMEME.

Plastic bags move frantically in time with unfathomable shitness. Knowbots scan the New York Power Authority for imminent blackouts. Ginny lifts her shirt collar up. A watering can in her right hand. Ginny snaps out of her blackout. She’s outside Gramercy Park. Ginny walks down from the intersection. A noose draped from the electricity pole. Shards of windscreen in a building site projecting the image of midday 1985. Ginny wears black slippers. Music fumbles from these black slippers. Ginny inspects the inside of her black slippers. Coal lumps at a bus stop. Ginny’s throat has tension and then none. Choking and limbs slowing let down. Ginny feeling within the Lower East Side. Ginny with sunglasses over eyeballs. A long coat over her body. Weeks of shoe polish washing in from Little Italy. A thin woman pushes through the fog. Graffitti all over the courthouses in Foley Squarae. Sadness. Ginny looks inside her hospital locker. Her fingers dangle like key chains. Her hands up against the mirror. Slowly and repeatedly. Steam on mirror, steam in bathroom. Cab drivers riding people over to the mall. Tourists telling fibs. Hair pushed back from forehead. Jeans in a tight-style. Cool morning air pumping in from Worth Street. Men with testicles all stooped on the ground, lope around Bayard Street. People dancing on gasoline. Disease in the air and tone tongue orchestras playing near South Street, the entrance to Brooklyn Bridge. Ginny’s lips. A mound of clay underneath Brooklyn Bridge. No one knows who placed it there. Garrottes draw blood from the broken window. Ginny trails her fingers along the wall. Cum in her hand. She smears it all the wall. The sound is vast. Financial organisations collapsing around Ann Street. Moustaches and women with waxed shins. Fungaql spores feel good in the stomach. Ginny smokes a Camel. Turns, walks off, pulls down her cap. Snowballs melting in Park Row. Desert sands winding around the Southbridge Towers. Little bones of the long minutes. Homicidal enthusiasts robed in rubbish wrappers and newspaper. Ginny swings left to right across Spruce Street. She chokes at the back of the bus. Ginny studies the subway timetable. She gets on at Grand Street Station. Cracked lips and cooling towers in Tribeca. NYC’s nature. Delays in getting out to 14th Street. Camel cigarettes smoking in Brookfield Place. A country will in war pull rank and leave you just with the lowly ranks. Burton sets the world at chance, in possibilities, and after a dose of stimulants, immunity. Orchestral sounds varying in pitch come from the Winter Garden Atrium. The music of ordinary meat. Ginny’s jawline. Ginny gags. Grimy smudges of name-calling. Police in darkness seize their prey. Despotic rats with no other form of unity. They need to stake a claim in commerce. Over-hated. Hauled in. Indifferent to everything. The doormat. Ginny’s legs. Her grazed knees. Ginny strangles herself. Arabian producers of oil throw themselves from the window of the New York Mercantile Exchange. Pitchforks on cemetery road. Camera moves across NYC’s inhabitants. Pretzel sellers inside the Irish Hunger Memorial. NYC morning silhouetted against fly-blown City Pier A. Spiders tracking Ginny’s eyes, her forehead. Metal spikes in the electricity pole outside the Flatiron Building. Ginny’s insides do all the talking. A sweating sheet consumes Ginny. Ankles exposed on the 23rd Street Station platform. Insect bites all over the walls of Baruch College. Ginny throwing her shoulders, her back to the street. The enamel on the glass, the windows of the Sohmer Piano Building, the gold dome. Rusted washing machines, refrigerators, car tyres, Ginny in sleeping bag, sleeping at Dead Horse Bay. Doll’s heads, alcohol bottles from 19th century, flour bags, mill parts, horse bones, glue pots, leather offcuts, driftwood, flotsam, napalm, oxidised bicycle frames, odd metal cabinets, kitchen sinks, human pelvis, prophylactics, spark plugs, battery acid, sodden shoes, vases, cracked mirror, hair brushes, belt buckles, rotary telephones, hessian sacks of fertilizer, rubber gloves, sea corridors, dolphin bones, coast guard flare guns, white puffs of jetsam rainclouds, visobule solutions of Celebrex, saline in IV drips, perforated medical waste. Ginny draws her eyes over to Gerritson Creek. Leading folds of seawater means Ginny anticipates something living out there. shoulder. Nothing behind me. I have a spare key. I guess I could stay at the hotel. Earl C looks at the sculpture. The nose is missing. She attaches the nose. Willie hurries to the elevators. A squeak catches her attention. She looks across the station, nothing but a homeless person on the bus. A packet of sugar on the dresser. Parcels of meat wrapped in butcher’s paper going mouldy. Earl C hunches over, snatches the Letraset, and runs. A middle-aged woman looks at me. She ices her voice. Look at her! She’s up. Running. Peeling off into tide. Into her room. The woman looks old. Metallic typefaces on subway entrances. Woman forward running. Outlandish motion. Fidgeting. Twitching. Get me out of here. A bread roll spinning on the hotel stairs. Drawstrings undone on my pyjamas. Willie picks my pyjamas up off the floor. A friend of your slippers. Indeed, she is correct. An ambulance crashes out on the highway. Replacement hips. Tobacco, one extract. Cocaine again in the bathroom. My future. Cubicle closed by shower door. Soap in the shape of opals. Soap taste inside mouth. Dogs patting sex dolls. Hair locks. Earl C hikes up the hill. Sailors annoying me with deck chairs. Index fingers snapped in two. Offal in a bucket. Rib gages turning in serrated gristle. Hard drives made of membrane. Earl C has a thickset neck suddenly. He’s aware that Ginny wants to slice it open. Ginny gets up from her bed. She’s dressed in polyester drapes. The diner is closed until dinnertime. Burton stops. He looks around. Respected guests pour out of the Waldorf Astoria. Cocaine dissolving on a placemat. Ginny drops what she can into a metal bucket. Laugh track gets louder. Burton glances to one side. He whispers, repeating numerical permutations. Barges in the Hudson River transport MOLMACs and barrels of nano-brain. Ginny’s with a cloth patch over both eyes. Dried lactose encrusts the left eye. Burton is on edge. NYC is out of control. Fire fighters fighting cops. Cops fighting cab drivers. Ginny spits at them. Solvent in Ginny’s plastic bag. Long letters in postal bags dripping in Extropiates. Coffee cups stacked up like piles of abandoned car tyres. Moneyback gurantees given for every purchase at every convineince store. Guide rails removed from Penn Station. Ginny’s hair past her shoulders. A hole in the plasterboard. Central Park seen through the hole. Amtrak services have no gods, or leaders or worthy humans. Ginny reaches over and turns the radio off. Her stomach rippling. Sick motion starts and the midtown area of Manhattan crashes into the earth. Ginny kneels onto a doormat. She inhales paint fumes. Ropes holding up the Empire State Building come undone. Swaets. Armipits. Criminal offences detailed in a public newspaper left on abandoned bus seat. Ginny listens to the powerlines in Koareatown Mugshot of a guy with a comb-over sentenced for tax avoidance. Bus crash outside Macy’s department store. Jam jars of blood everywhere over the sidewalk. Neat Brooks Brothers suit, all entirely fashionable. Ginny smirks, she takes her coat off. She hangs it in her hospital locker. Delivery drivers standing in phone booths. Apartment doors opening up. Gabardine shredded in photocopiers. Movie posters in cab windows. Quiet gravestones in Seventh Avenue. Choking noises heard from inside Madison Square Garden. Strange guttural and starving. News reports from the Third World. Displaced people dead-pressed by torrential winds. Memotypes scroll across the TV screen. Patterned and strobing shapes disrupt traffic around 31st and 34th Streets. CoBots dressed in pyjamas and a dressing gown wade around the entrance to the North River Tunnel. Ginny extracts herself from her body. She looks. Pokes around. Her mouth and lips. Sunrise. Ginny talks in strange technical jargon. She swallows, then flicks a ball of saliva onto her leg. A strongbox of donuts falls from the cinema screen. Cigarette burns on the sofa. Doctors then patients Farm animals sniffing piles of discarded clothing out near Tottenville Station. Staten Island drowns into the Atlantic. Ginny brushes her hair down with her palm. She licks her palm beforehand. Ginny tightens her belt. Buildings tumble into the Hudson River. Commuters flee North down 14th Street. Ginny coughs. Her bones creak. Military nanoswarm weapons fire all the yellow cabs on the isle of Manhattan, search for universal payoffs, prerogatives and the object of contract between two beings on the shorelines of the East River. Impact over the back of the bus seat. A giant weather balloon, I am not sure. The size of the acid tab is normal, all unsorted gravel material, all lacklustre. Earl C looks both ways. Drug material. I’m gonna head into the subway, breathe out the frosting air, light a cigarette as two police walk toward me from the other end of an overpass. She wears an Orioles cap consisting of foulbrood snakes. I am not sure. Burton thinks she hasn’t cut the acid properly. The soil’s lower than on the surface. The dunes burn and then hit the road. Burton and I are shoe-less, ambling away on ankles. “What’s your name?” Earl C asks as she twists hair curls. She notices the rope binds around my hands. I’m going to drink from the Starbucks up on Columbus Avenue and name the pharmaceuticals, the emotions of man as animal! She winds her hair right off at the base. The NYC, the bungalows are now a target for satirists and food fights. Earl C is the girl. She catches my eye. The edge of the crown where the girl is raw-boned, sharp-cornered and skinny. The subway takes water rapidly. SORTING AND POROSITY. Effects in sand dunes that protect them from spilt oil. I’m going out in the November mid-morning, with body and high-arching flames rising from the remains of heavy diarrhoea on the doorstep of the Goodwill store on W 72nd Street. Similar processes. Ticket stubs. Bottles of brandy. Cocaine is moist. Can’t move it at all. Hand reconstruction. I’m going to grow up to be a recluse and a CIA detainee, obscured by basilisks and delirium. Porosity in earth sciences and the sea. Outlandish dimensions. There is no room. I lift a petty cash box onto my eaten sandwich, which usually appears orange or yellow. Armies of abdomen hidden in haversack. EARL C LEAVES HER BELONGINGS. I strip down to my underwear. “Yeah it’s here.” “What’s here?” Earl C replies. A marionette copy, all blushed cheeked. A voice over a loudspeaker in the background. Myself on a bus heading up a busy street, draped behind a curtain, running down the hall. “Water dribbles into the subway.” Burton mentions, shaking the haversack off. I am your mom. I am the clothes your mom lays out on the bed in the morning that enclose you. Earl C hasn’t expected me to cum. All semen evolving in jaws. Narrow bodies, abandoned snakes. The calico and shellac used to provide counterfeit handbags. The spaceships take off. Those on board are destined for New York NYC life, a grey colour, massive in size. This immaculate condition is more than our bones. I enclose you. I’m going to photocopy your face at funerals. This is the result, a radiation of bony fish, crab mains and ballooning ocean, the factors which affect geometry. Gulf War 7. LOSSES NOT REPORTED. Burton was confused, concerned that we would suddenly become pawns of the Chinese, or some other unilateral power. Vietnam was a mistake, perhaps so the Cold War. No one sees this current conflict as a civil war anyway. Earl C was born in Kentucky. He moved around itinerantly before settling in Oakland. He believed the world had been fighting the Chinese for well over 1000 years. As the temperatures rise, so does the suicide rate. It is pushing out to 300,000 to 400,000 monthly. Half of that is failed attempts, those that end up hospitalised. Bombings over the mountain ranges. The ‘Hollywood’ sign. No amount of bombing would cure Burton’s ills. According to Burton, the amount of war was absurd. Elements of tyranny and aggression perpetrated by the New States of America. A rock on the carpet. THE CORRIDOR. It fills with secretaries. Earl C heads over to the payphone and picks up the receiver. A warm summer afternoon. The meat flesh is mislaid, overlooked. A widower with his shirt wide open. Buttons popping everywhere. Willie and Burton laugh anyway. Transplants and antibodies set off in cargo holds for Northern Africa. I look over my the shoulder of the expressway. Tears rolling down Earl C’s face. Robots acting as unusual animals. Native cats sleeping inside salience. News tickers spluttering in deflated pixels. Further silence. Children dope smoking for ISIS. Police in civilian clothing advancing with mace rifles, squinting in the sunlight, pulling at the rope with a noose at the end. Netflix offering a season’s pass for advertisements. Product placements for potato mash, more doom and gloom on NBC. Earl C walking leisurely down to the East Village. Holograms of Lindsay Lohan’s autopsy. Pipettes of poisonous bacteria and Dilaterol. Syrup, tables and injections to assist in mind uploading to the internet. Burton by the side of the road. His two legs broken. Body in a wheelchair. The stars come out every third night in Manhattan. Our arrival @ JFK in the winter of 101741 far out over the deathlands. Police siren wailing. The paper stainer making wallpaper again. Fingers spread out limply. Sheets of blank paper. I walk the corridor. Taking spare change from the alms box. The crowd at Times Square, Penn Station fall back into the subway. Fleeing with ravenous eyes and muttering monosyllabic: Alive—alive! Humped all the way from the Hudson River up 42nd Street, past the Actor’s Studio into the bar of the Algonquin Hotel. Ushered and sat into booth for a late lunch of hamburger and hash browns and draught beer. Waiters tearing up our order. Anodic voice mounting on my internal rocks. Earl C dips four fingers into acidic liquid. A girl stands aside as Burton enters the room. He shuts me out. POTUS on the television screens. Burton ushers everyone out onto the terrace. He provides a presentation on the human-machine symbiosis. He into it. A millionaire who wants to live forever. He will make it happen. Pushing to float on the stock exchange products for augmented reality. Too much government interference Burton notes. Cashmere jackets with MIDI controller interface. A meatpacker in NOHO warehouse mass-producing medical modifications that permanently alter or replace the excretive function of the human body. An ugly scene. Daft prototypes. Earl C promoting involuntary cochlear implants. Ears removed at birth replaced with headphones / transistor earpieces. Uptown Manhattan now has more citizens whose body contain prosthetics. Birth-hands sheared off and exchanged with cybernetic ones. Robotic exoskeletons rejected by war veterans as being unfashionable. The handicapped would rather crawl. Burton wearing high-tech surgical gloves. Sense in some heightened way. Enhancements to fingertips that make the electrical properties of tissue more profound. Burton conducting targeted ultrasounds on reclaimed cult members. In Washington Square, subhuman cyborgs sew together electronic skin. Skin draped over burn victims to restore sensation. Hands tied behind my back. Optic implants. Certain times of the year the NYC gas lamps have their supply cut off. Bionic limbs. Artificial organs on sale at Bemelmans Bar. Earl C sweeping out the sickroom. The door ajar. A well-dressed, rather wise-looking man hanging around the murder scene. Private prisons dot the landscape. Potatoes and mash and gloom for prisoners in these penitentiaries. People walking leisurely down to the East Village. Burton stands up, unsteadily panting. Earl C ushers him onto the gangplank grinning. Beyond lies death and sunken faces. Too louche to be religious. A beheading in Times Square, during the intermission of ‘The Lion King’. Shuttle busses from CUNY for people to watch. Rubber heads roll off into the East River. Head rubber-rolls off like doll’s head. Bloodied hair lock in the sewer. Flesh that smells like bromine. Earl C throws a leg bone into oncoming traffic. Burton turfs outdoor chairs. Free cigarettes dropped from zeppelins over the skyline. Foodstuffs burning in the Bronx. I cannot stand folks who want to remember. Burton hands pre-rolled joints to his friends. Their session is the best one yet. Willie does the same thing I do, drinks a vanilla milkshake. Willie tells me that if I were willing to start a war, I would have a loyal and living brother. I agree. I fall silent and look around in surprise. We make it out to Staten Island. The seaside stay agrees. Huge pacifiers blowing out from Washington Bridge. NO TITLE. THE LONG FLOWING SNOW FALLS AT THE SAME TIME. I’m gonna Netflix rolling down Broadway like tumbleweed. Burton can’t be bothered. Burton looks at the statue of the child. Tribes of Amazonians. Bloodied hearts on the jungle floor. GIFs rendered as sentences backed with marvellous intellect. Girls as women, dark-complexions. It’s a fine day and the sun is sparkling. Inside the hotel, Burton logs onto dating websites. Description as infantile attempt. Laughing fits and Pepsi-Cola on the laptop screen. Burton is staggered. He has no idea how to describe himself. He’s all at sea. Would marriage be beneath him? Something like that. Does he excuse himself from the table once he finishes corn soup? That sort of thing. Image assistants uploading glamour shots of themselves. Burton describing his time on the planet. How he sees caterpillars turning into crows. Burton doesn’t know much. Burton doesn’t stay on the internet very long. GIF cleaned smoothly, systematically. GIF living in an upstairs place containing a soft drink dispenser, a coffee table, a double bed in the corner, a refrigerator filled with foodstuffs and amphetamines. GIF as wax effigy / molten centre. Burton blots out the elemental residue caused by GIF melting. Earl C splices the mainframe with a dead community. The dating website now has a decorative outline. Half-deliberate cocaine deals with those who believe in dating websites. Laughing fits. Language with a small moustache and keen eyes. Burton writes on a post-it note, his cursive in unique form. Burton goes to his job. 3 p.m. on a weekday. Burton makes clumsily fashioned small-scale models of the United States. He constructs models using old cigarette packets. He cuts the packets using a pair of shears. He balances the models on rivers of jelly, configuring shy damsels from the rubbish bin, on clear cold windless afternoons (if you’re interested). Translated famine. Burton never thought he’d be employed like this. He never thought he’d have a contingency of assistants helping him. You may not like it, but the world has been wrung through Photoshop. You can see it from the balcony, filter over filter of false impression. This is the light switch. This is the way to the apartment block. I disappear, no care and finish. Candice shows potential tenants around the apartment, there’s lots of activity. FADE OUT – (softly). I run up the flight of steps. INT. TOWER STAIRWELL – NIGHT. DISSOLVE TO shot of Candice. Her hand with cigarette lighter. She puffs. I insist she continues. She has the cheeks for it. Hotel manager comes up, nods admiration and we head for the consulting-room. Hotel manager measures Candice’s height. She’s invisible. Candice won’t join me in reading the Sunday paper. I sink into the patio recliner on the front porch. Rubbish by the wayside, kitchenettes on the side of the road. I focus on a doll about three inches in height. Someone’s put it out to be collected. Candice crosses in front of the fountain and hurries away from me. My cabin is at the back of the hotel. I talk at random to Candice, trying to distract her. Listen did I tell you about the… My voice trails off. On the porch, I look at the cold houses, the tower clock stands still. CUT TO: (interrupting) – Come, come, don’t tell me how to be sorry. Candice does all she can to prevent herself from being nasty. She drops the bottle of amyl, steps on the staircase. Somebody walks down the stairs. The soda is not perfect, but the Scotch is superb. Candice drops her negligee and leaves the room. EXT. THE FIGURE OF ST. SEBASTIAN. Hotel manager walks with a heavy automatic. WIPE TO an altar with bongo drums. Candice has bongo drums between her legs. I walk to the dining table. I advise the hotel manager to stop throwing guests out, they’re my friends. The hotel manager will stop ejecting guests this evening, but will resume tomorrow. In the lobby, there is a corner with hardly any furniture in it. An old version of Candice. I can do nothing, except, a deep breath. Custom-set out coffee cups. Candice is on my arm. I am I think of that he was. Burton suggested we go to sleep. Shot clocks buzzing on the basketball court. Prosthetics twitching on a small side street; the backyard leads to a public park. The get-together is quite unusual. There are about 5-6 people inside the apartment. Ginny and myself, some other folks. Everyone has finished work and has come straight over. Someone bought Thai food. Tranquilised on pie charts and PowerPoint presentation. Ginny has a sample and everyone is willing to try it. She reads aloud the product description: A baffling and astonishing belch of alchemy creating a passionate and dirt-free fragrance. A beckon of brilliance from citrus fruits combined with ornate clarification and then continuing with forested and peppery accord. The channel on the television set switches to Channel 44, a picture of male genitalia and an elastic massaging jacket moving in-and-out of static. Until the recent discovery of cloning, no one thought that technology was in any way helpful or successful. Wake or night watch, helicopters overhead with searchlight and siren. Television’s main purpose is to connect the reciprocating mechanism that drives the wooden crosspieces that are placed under the wrists, elbows and guide rails of all snitches / accomplices. Ginny sneezes. No one cares. Ginny pulls out more vials. She wheezes. Place it to your nostrils, form an outer wall, like a sliding unit, move the vial about the nostril. Move the vial reciprocally so it connects to the minute members of the perfume into your brain. Move the rotating shaft 31 degrees. Ginny looks at the vials, horse tranquilizers, poppers from sex shops that skewer the victim. Ginny once had a friend who destroyed their friendship. Ginny Hughes was huffing down poppers between the dance floor and the toilet stall. This friend, more a sterile acquaintance, was concerned that Ginny was inhaling the poppers. His father was a veterinarian. The veterinarian’s son described to Ginny that the perfume vapour created massive holes in one’s brain. GIF file as newspapers. Burton lays flat on the ground. He completes his work inside the company’s holiday villa. He reads the instruction manual several times. There is more than one narrative in the instruction manual. Burton works besides vacuum gauges under hot sweat steam and pressure overhead. He is alone – once more – working. Track suits / brand name. Billboard’s advertising TV documentaries that outline the beauty and savagery of the human contribution. The process of strengthening and integrating CPU into plastic brain moulds. Earl C slides into midnight. Crimson-stained. Emotional signs include sighs and deep breaths. The door opens. Take that money. Polluted lobsters with identification bracelets around pincers. Burton takes a swig of synthetic water. Wife wields her hips over Earl C. The dawn on a projection screen. Nothing brings my attention to it. The sun rises. Xerox of a Xerox over Manhattan. Bubbling fat on Burton’s skin. Bright lights, loud music, young kids. Earl C’s wife is a cardboard cutout. She’s in the doorway. She turns the music off. She’s doused in blonde mechanisms. A torn genus of deadly moth. The wife lurking in the good values of degeneracy. She tears Burton’s clothes off, actions recorded in unpublished histogram. Unfamiliar people are irritating. Jetsam falls away from a dead man. The dying art of breath. Earl C disappears under his wife’s cotton dress. This nightmare of a giant man, his red mouth moves, disposing of him, let alone murdering him. Burton stares madly at Earl C’s wife. Downtown in the South end of the NYC, a mist-hung gun whips up the mob. BWAP BWAP. Earl C sobs in the pale dawn. Someone else screams. The strange assignment of lace doused over Earl C’s wife. Dinner chairs burring in a Pizza Hut car park. Burton opens the window, calling out swiftly to his interior voice. Drinks at four. Several minutes later, sweat forms on Earl C’s brow. Constantly unfolding elements, Burton notices the disgust. Earl C presses demands onto Burton. Vermouth in a trough. Television light projectiles in the night. Vibrant against Burton’s skin. Some talk about nurses. Faces gleaming through the Manhattan haze. One old man altogether on bench in Washington Square. He turns to his daughter’s books, her fashion magazines all tangled up. He picks up a piece of wood, inspecting it. Daughter’s hair the shade of the icy background. Her money purse Psychic nose on her. Bruises. Trains in the rail yard pull out. Blood drained from Earl C’s boss. No needs for faces in NYC. Spit cloth around shoes at Grand Central Station. Unsound chairs. Burton having a bath using the restroom sinks. Jehovah’s Witnesses with clipboards. Post-humans jammed up the front of the Staten Island Ferry. Cryo-patients chipped and thawed by jackhammers and drills. Chemical leeching understood through haptic perception. Priestess buried out on Potter’s Field / Hart Island. Super-computers plugging out of gene therapy. Perpetual studying and re-examining of infrawaves under the East River. Livers and lungs washing ashore in Astoria. Indefinite lifespan in Burton’s sweat pores. He tried to slide, then penetrate in my body. Sea and space colonies outgrow modern effete civilization. Robotic self-replication, molecular manufacturing. They’re building the O’Neil cylinder out in Morristown. Trance-like on Ward’s Island. The homeless taking giant shots of Brandy. Fire in the hearth. Someone on the subway barbequing commuter’s faces. Buskers all bored. Burton standing in the driveway, lit up by the streetlights. Burton holds his weapon and fires a single shot. His head disappears entirely. A torrent of blasts rips into the burning house. Bricks destroyed. Cement vaporising. The wood of the front door splinters. Clouds of dust and fireworks. Tanks in Times Square fishtailing sideways. Soldiers stomping heads halfway between BB King Blues Club & Grill and the MTV Studios. Coffee shop for lease. Retail shop for lease. Chest pockets on police uniforms. Armoured vehicles to the right of soldiers. Armoured vechiles blaring down the street. Smouldering houses with fire fighters stripping off their clothes. Tiplerites burnt by enormous ironing surfaces. Burton got close enough to see the pained expressions on their faces. NYC bombed back to Year Zero. Mouths open but no sound coming out. Canons adjusted. Canons erupting. Cacophony. Dust and bullshit. Technocytes in the blood stream making the user immune to commit acts of treason. Mehums pounding the steel body of the abandoned cars. Scrap metal, flint sparks, shattered glass. The vehicle’s inside is in flame. Earl C drops his wine glass. He’s bored, depressed, stacked and tied up in twine. A Hare Krishna awakes and learns that his entire life has become secondary to the broadcasting of a meme. At every opportunity that Hare Krishna is mentioned, this broadcasting is completed. Movie poster torn on alley wall. Rain sodden. Half-snivelling songs coming in from the outside. Immense sunshine over cold fields. Car parks up to the front entrance of a tenement. Dew drops emulsify under the girders of Robert F. Kennedy Bridge. Crypto-anarchists making settlements out near Hell Gate. Orange headbands around their foreheads. Donut-mongers on the forecourt of the United Nations. Concurrent damage caused by BGM-109 Tomahawks. Burton with a minty-fresh mouth. Enemy Identified Man. Jacket pocket rubbing against Burton. Virginia takes her sunglasses off. Her gaze is ancient times. She struggle for breath. A bus, repeat, a bus. Soldiers hanging out smoking Camels. A glimpse of their murderous results in the newspaper headlines. In a wood cabin. Warm bed this morning. Earl C doesn’t use a tape measure. Suddenly the voice of command, a paper bag full of prolapse. Burton gets into the car. Earl C burrows into the trees. After about forty minutes, Burton gives up and head back to the subway. A new side part in his hair. Milk sugars and empty sequences. Over skyscrapers and ugly scenes, from sick rooms and street vendors, inside certain times of the year, as the refrigerator door is left ajar, Ginny discovers she’s cut her hair by the light of a kerosene lamp. The inside of her the refrigerator is a vacant landscape of chocolate bars, delicatessen pickles, luncheon meats, of well-dressed, rather wise-looking people snivelling in the butter tray, collapsing slowly down the handrail of the vegetable crisper, hotel guests in town for the travel agent conference, a valet service of coma, stupor, a piercing cry of terror, blood dripping from the floor, milk/beer bottles on the floor unopened…eternal stasis. Inhaling amyl on the subway. Goosebumps, measles and spotty pus things as Ginny Hughes enters the apartment. Ginny works as a telephone psychic. The apartment is Arturo Cobb’s place. It is a dump. The apartment looks out onto …. somewhere.

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