Rudiments of a short story:
Quote:
A pretty girl sips coffee in a café. Superimposed upon this scene of peaceful repose are the collected flames of hell in circular, licking and lilting the boundaries of perception. She looks up; it’s love at first sight. Her mouth opens in breathless wonder, she is clearly about to speak, but instead of words, song. White lines ripple from her rose-rimmed lips, weaving a spider web of ecstasy. She is saddened. Her face distorts and explodes into a million stars. His eyes open.
Only next does the alarm clock across the room go off. He sheds his sheets and staggers across. He is still half asleep. If he can extinguish the alarm and get back in bed, he will not remember that it had gone off in the first place. A heap of laundry and a can full of coins are stacked atop the alarm clock by his wily self of yesterday to thwart this well known strategy. It is a war between the conscious and the un. Before he can make it to the clock, however, the broken glass on the floor and more importantly his bare feet hurtle him into lucidity.
The countermeasures seem silly now. He unplugs the clock. Sharp, blue light cuts through the windows, cut like little knives. Or maybe broken glass. He opens the window and pities all the squares downstairs who scurry off to church. He yawns in disinterested contempt. The air is dry, drier than his throat. He feels sick in the stomach. The refrigerator is fruitless. Fruit is in there – drinks as well – but none will help. His is the thirst that is not so easily quenched. Merely looking at that orange juice container evokes nightmares of ten too many screwdrivers. He might as well be looking at a liquor cabinet…
He heads to the sink. The tap water, however, laced with rust and trace minerals tastes distinctly of cheap vodka. He can’t drink it but he must. He fills five Dixie cups and sits on the scummy tiles that are his bathroom floor. He bangs his head on the wall but he really doesn’t care. After only one sip, the Dixie cups remind him too much of double shotglasses, hours and lifetimes ago when it was beer o’clock. He just wants to go back to bed. He’d just as easily slump over here, but he doesn’t want those full cups staring at him. He’d feel responsible. Forcing two down, he relishes in crushing the rest and retreats to his room.
That blue light doesn’t cut so much anymore. Reality is coming in all dull and depressing. Everything is blurred. He kind of preferred that sharp intensity. He flips a switch and the previously inert ceiling lights electrify. They’re fluorescent, and they emit a sickly, green light. He turns on the desk lamp; it’s a sleepy, incandescent yellow. The morning shines in all blue – beautiful if not sickened by smog. White light seeps from a refrigerator door that’s not quite shut. It’s a ****ing rainbow, right here, in his room. And it’s still not bright enough.
He lies back in bed, but he’s tired of sleeping. He could probably drop off if it weren’t for an invisible nail driven into his skull. Time out – why did his wily past-self set up the clock trap… if it was a Saturday night? Now the real alarms go off. Those squares downstairs were headed off to work, not church. Unless they’re clergy, in which case the three are one – but there’s no time for idle thoughts: he’s really, really late!
Cue the chase music. Behind the bars of starched pinstripes, he tries knotting his tie three times, once too low, twice too high, the third time, he just throws on a sweater so no one’ll notice. No sooner does he pull up some trousers than he drops them again, for old Dixie has had its revenge at last. He figures he’ll multitask, he’s not really using those hands for anything, anyway, so he starts brushing his teeth at the same time. This is what separates us from the animals, he thinks, a paragon of human ingenuity… that is, until he drops the toothbrush. He surely doesn’t have time for this so he flushes and walks on. Styling his hair with a handful of fingers, he takes one dashing glance in the mirror and he’s off. And back again for his coat. And then back again for his keys. Now that he’s remembered everything, he punches it for the elevator, but by the time it arrives, he’s already resigned himself to the stairs. He does live on the second floor, anyway. Somehow, when he rushes, he always ends up taking far more time than he would have anyway. He steps outside. If the stabs the light took earlier upstairs hurt, now it’s cutting ALL OVER HIS BODY. He’s snow blind and it’s barely July. Waving his hands about him, he feels his way to the car.
The engine roars to life, pistons pushing the molten blood of the earth inside his sleek metal monster of a steed. It’s ironic that these tailfin thunderers, so deserving of an open highway to run free, so often find themselves in stand-still rush hour traffic. Some people call it ‘peak hour’ because there’s certainly no rush about it. He thinks of all that time he’s sat stuck in traffic, waiting in line, watching commercials, all that time that’s wasted away. He might as well be dead already. It’s just him and his thought in that car – a dangerous association. The silence makes him uneasy, ****, it downright scares him. He turns up the radio so he won’t have to think. Commercials, commercials, DJs laughing at him, crude humor, pop music, static, commercials. He could have sworn he’d programmed stations that played music as his favorite frequencies.
What’s he even going towards, he wonders. Work, of course, but what does he do there? Mush numbers and stare at a clock on a laptop screen all day. Somehow this makes him a productive member of society. And he hasn’t even remembered to bring his laptop. Of course, now he says he knew he’d forgotten something. Time to turn that horse around. Only problem is, he’s stuck in traffic as farther than the eye can see. It’s stretched out even farther than traffic-cam can see, and that’s pretty far.
Shirk it though he may, in machine capitalism, if you don’t but into the system, you don’t eat. He needs that job and it’s already on the line. His cycle has been both downward and vicious in these days of late. Desperate times call for desperate action, although that was definitely the tagline for the movie ‘Striptease.’ He merges into the left land amidst fevered honks and immediately the right lurches into motion. Dead end.
But then, in a deus ex radio moment, his speakers sing the most jump-jivingest, pedal-to-the-metalest, get up and go ROCK AND ROLL MUSIC he has ever heard. His volume gets high and his feet get heavy as he cuts clear across that divide ant into the opposite lane of traffic and now it’s time to head out on the highway and mock all those fools sitting in their power-assisted paralysis.
In perfect harmony, he hits those brakes and skids into groove with the flow of traffic around him. He’s shaking like a leaf but it is a higher high. Weaving a thread of panic behind him, the world blurs and the wind howls. He howls with it. He’s laughing too. No one’s ever trapped, he thinks, the cage has been unlocked all along, few have the balls to open it and step out. The highway was no problem and he covers the past half an hour in half a minute.
Ahead of him, a path of lights switches green in perfect tune to the music. This was surely destined to be. He roars on through like the terrible Hand of God. The car is shaking with the pent up energy of a lifetime consigned to mediocrity. It feels like the very pavement should be splitting up behind him.
Due to their elemental nature, people often find colors difficult to describe. Within the limited scope of human light perception there is a technically unlimited palette at the eye’s disposal. The occurrence of certain colors in certain situations from experience often lead to common connotations for such colors, and social planners know this. These connotations are often subconscious, and as such, fall under a more fundamental level of human perception. This is usually emotional. People often associate the color red, for instance, with passion. In the chromatic parlance of traffic signaling, however, it is most often associated with DANGER.
Two cars collided with a metallic crunch. This is either the beginning of a mechanical physics problem or the end of a life. The car speeding into the three-way intersection, heedless of the signal ahead that had just indicated to stop, slammed into the side of another vehicle, uncasing the engine almost immediately, triggering an impressive explosion that flipped the oncoming car around. Tremendous gravitation forces wrenched all parts of the vehicle in chaotic directions, however the driver, still conscious in the midst of impending destruction, glimpsed a strangely familiar glass façade shimmering with what was headed straight for it.
A pretty girl sips coffee in a café. She looks up; it’s love at first sight. What is she saying?
“No.”
Only next does the alarm clock across the room go off. He sheds his sheets and staggers across. He is still half asleep. If he can extinguish the alarm and get back in bed, he will not remember that it had gone off in the first place. A heap of laundry and a can full of coins are stacked atop the alarm clock by his wily self of yesterday to thwart this well known strategy. It is a war between the conscious and the un. Before he can make it to the clock, however, the broken glass on the floor and more importantly his bare feet hurtle him into lucidity.
The countermeasures seem silly now. He unplugs the clock. Sharp, blue light cuts through the windows, cut like little knives. Or maybe broken glass. He opens the window and pities all the squares downstairs who scurry off to church. He yawns in disinterested contempt. The air is dry, drier than his throat. He feels sick in the stomach. The refrigerator is fruitless. Fruit is in there – drinks as well – but none will help. His is the thirst that is not so easily quenched. Merely looking at that orange juice container evokes nightmares of ten too many screwdrivers. He might as well be looking at a liquor cabinet…
He heads to the sink. The tap water, however, laced with rust and trace minerals tastes distinctly of cheap vodka. He can’t drink it but he must. He fills five Dixie cups and sits on the scummy tiles that are his bathroom floor. He bangs his head on the wall but he really doesn’t care. After only one sip, the Dixie cups remind him too much of double shotglasses, hours and lifetimes ago when it was beer o’clock. He just wants to go back to bed. He’d just as easily slump over here, but he doesn’t want those full cups staring at him. He’d feel responsible. Forcing two down, he relishes in crushing the rest and retreats to his room.
That blue light doesn’t cut so much anymore. Reality is coming in all dull and depressing. Everything is blurred. He kind of preferred that sharp intensity. He flips a switch and the previously inert ceiling lights electrify. They’re fluorescent, and they emit a sickly, green light. He turns on the desk lamp; it’s a sleepy, incandescent yellow. The morning shines in all blue – beautiful if not sickened by smog. White light seeps from a refrigerator door that’s not quite shut. It’s a ****ing rainbow, right here, in his room. And it’s still not bright enough.
He lies back in bed, but he’s tired of sleeping. He could probably drop off if it weren’t for an invisible nail driven into his skull. Time out – why did his wily past-self set up the clock trap… if it was a Saturday night? Now the real alarms go off. Those squares downstairs were headed off to work, not church. Unless they’re clergy, in which case the three are one – but there’s no time for idle thoughts: he’s really, really late!
Cue the chase music. Behind the bars of starched pinstripes, he tries knotting his tie three times, once too low, twice too high, the third time, he just throws on a sweater so no one’ll notice. No sooner does he pull up some trousers than he drops them again, for old Dixie has had its revenge at last. He figures he’ll multitask, he’s not really using those hands for anything, anyway, so he starts brushing his teeth at the same time. This is what separates us from the animals, he thinks, a paragon of human ingenuity… that is, until he drops the toothbrush. He surely doesn’t have time for this so he flushes and walks on. Styling his hair with a handful of fingers, he takes one dashing glance in the mirror and he’s off. And back again for his coat. And then back again for his keys. Now that he’s remembered everything, he punches it for the elevator, but by the time it arrives, he’s already resigned himself to the stairs. He does live on the second floor, anyway. Somehow, when he rushes, he always ends up taking far more time than he would have anyway. He steps outside. If the stabs the light took earlier upstairs hurt, now it’s cutting ALL OVER HIS BODY. He’s snow blind and it’s barely July. Waving his hands about him, he feels his way to the car.
The engine roars to life, pistons pushing the molten blood of the earth inside his sleek metal monster of a steed. It’s ironic that these tailfin thunderers, so deserving of an open highway to run free, so often find themselves in stand-still rush hour traffic. Some people call it ‘peak hour’ because there’s certainly no rush about it. He thinks of all that time he’s sat stuck in traffic, waiting in line, watching commercials, all that time that’s wasted away. He might as well be dead already. It’s just him and his thought in that car – a dangerous association. The silence makes him uneasy, ****, it downright scares him. He turns up the radio so he won’t have to think. Commercials, commercials, DJs laughing at him, crude humor, pop music, static, commercials. He could have sworn he’d programmed stations that played music as his favorite frequencies.
What’s he even going towards, he wonders. Work, of course, but what does he do there? Mush numbers and stare at a clock on a laptop screen all day. Somehow this makes him a productive member of society. And he hasn’t even remembered to bring his laptop. Of course, now he says he knew he’d forgotten something. Time to turn that horse around. Only problem is, he’s stuck in traffic as farther than the eye can see. It’s stretched out even farther than traffic-cam can see, and that’s pretty far.
Shirk it though he may, in machine capitalism, if you don’t but into the system, you don’t eat. He needs that job and it’s already on the line. His cycle has been both downward and vicious in these days of late. Desperate times call for desperate action, although that was definitely the tagline for the movie ‘Striptease.’ He merges into the left land amidst fevered honks and immediately the right lurches into motion. Dead end.
But then, in a deus ex radio moment, his speakers sing the most jump-jivingest, pedal-to-the-metalest, get up and go ROCK AND ROLL MUSIC he has ever heard. His volume gets high and his feet get heavy as he cuts clear across that divide ant into the opposite lane of traffic and now it’s time to head out on the highway and mock all those fools sitting in their power-assisted paralysis.
In perfect harmony, he hits those brakes and skids into groove with the flow of traffic around him. He’s shaking like a leaf but it is a higher high. Weaving a thread of panic behind him, the world blurs and the wind howls. He howls with it. He’s laughing too. No one’s ever trapped, he thinks, the cage has been unlocked all along, few have the balls to open it and step out. The highway was no problem and he covers the past half an hour in half a minute.
Ahead of him, a path of lights switches green in perfect tune to the music. This was surely destined to be. He roars on through like the terrible Hand of God. The car is shaking with the pent up energy of a lifetime consigned to mediocrity. It feels like the very pavement should be splitting up behind him.
Due to their elemental nature, people often find colors difficult to describe. Within the limited scope of human light perception there is a technically unlimited palette at the eye’s disposal. The occurrence of certain colors in certain situations from experience often lead to common connotations for such colors, and social planners know this. These connotations are often subconscious, and as such, fall under a more fundamental level of human perception. This is usually emotional. People often associate the color red, for instance, with passion. In the chromatic parlance of traffic signaling, however, it is most often associated with DANGER.
Two cars collided with a metallic crunch. This is either the beginning of a mechanical physics problem or the end of a life. The car speeding into the three-way intersection, heedless of the signal ahead that had just indicated to stop, slammed into the side of another vehicle, uncasing the engine almost immediately, triggering an impressive explosion that flipped the oncoming car around. Tremendous gravitation forces wrenched all parts of the vehicle in chaotic directions, however the driver, still conscious in the midst of impending destruction, glimpsed a strangely familiar glass façade shimmering with what was headed straight for it.
A pretty girl sips coffee in a café. She looks up; it’s love at first sight. What is she saying?
“No.”
