I race ahead of sloth and solitude. I pace steps ahead of an inexorable somnolence that I know I will eventually succumb to, but I’m awake for now. Will this be another drab little scrap1 of writing that will remain endless in perpetuity? Race, my thoughts, my love, my earnest desire to leave an imprint of my consciousness before I too, fade away. Run to stay afloat, for lack of a boat, in this world bereft of metaphor2, stay alive.
I find myself in a victorian chamber of an elevator. The ornate buttons tell me that the I'm in a building with three floors. The address in the scrap of parchment in my hand tells me that I need to visit someone on the fifth. I have no time, I can feel it gaining on me. The 8-bit digital floor readout is the only anatopism3 I can see. I press 2, and keep staring at the mirror opposite the floor beacon as it says I've arrived at 5. I walk out..
There's no music this time, unless you count the washing machine getting it on with the dishwasher. The strident metallic moans do have some sort of rhythm to it, if you listen carefully. Feeling a bit like an unwitting voyeur, I turn back and try to concentrate on my newspaper. An advertisement for food delivered by drones during traffic jams dances merrily in a corner. One would think that with all the advances we have with self-driving cars, humanity would've been rid of traffic jams by now. But apparently all it takes is for the strident morality hardcoded into the cars to decide that if they waited around things would resolve themselves with a minimal loss of life, while one kid with a go-cart drives around throwing thumb tacks and flipping people off. Then again, when people have everything they need inside cars, would you mind being in a jam? I turn off the display and sit in the darkness for a moment, letting my eyes acclimate before I open the door and step out..
Sitting quietly in a corner of the resort I see families come back from the slopes, crusted with flaky snow less than a day old. Ski resorts had become one of the more favoured holiday destinations after the zombie apocalypse, since the zoms had to trudge wearily up the cold slopes as skiers with everything ranging from mallets to chainsaws came hurtling down the hill at breakneck speed, their counterbalanced weaponry spelling armageddon for the bludsuckers. Funny that none had thought to go for the ski lifts, although they were some of the most fortified places in the resort one would imagine that under the overwhelming numbers that the zombies had it wouldn't be much of an issue. I would stick around a bit longer, but I'd been bitten recently and was feeling an itching in my calf. I took a last drag and stepped out...
It sure is nice to be a lichen. If you ask me, we're at the top of the evolutionary food chain. So what if these hairless apes build their roads and their cities? When you've been around for as long as we have, all of these constructs take on an ephemeral air, fleeting in their brief occupancy of time and space, but oshitoshit one of the buggers is going to poop on me again..
Ibask in my office chair. Well, lounge in it. Well, sit in a mildly decrepit manner, terrified by whether my emotional atavism will reassert itself in a display of catatonic dominance this rainy autumn evening4 fine summer morning. This squalid city welcomes criminals the way ants are drawn towards honey modestly crime-filled town is responsible for my healthy income, and I don't know if I can survive another brawl in an alley against a glinting switchblade need to charge my camera before I go shadow Mr. Tremblay's wife. I shrug into my long brown overcoat, put on my tattered hat, and head out..
The paladin rolls a hundred and sixty sided die and shrugs at me, before announcing triumphantly, 'I buy Piccadilly.' I groan inwardly as I anticipate the inevitable. 'You retroactively owe me rent, Artificer!' I look at my own hand, with two rubies and a pair of dice blessed by the twins of fate and fortune. It sure would be nice if I could actually trust them for once. I looked at lady fate, sitting beside me and smiling sweetly as I staked my coins and rolled the dice, and knew that things were going to go horribly wrong...
'IT IS TIME.', said a voice, sepulchral in its intonation, dripping finality the way a waffle prepared by a doting grandmother drips syrup5.
'I know.', I told her, a bit more testily than I intended to. Jerking a finger at her companion, I said, 'I'm fine with you, its him that I have a bone to pick.'
--------------------
1 : perhaps the true origins of the word drabble. Or as Sir Terry would have said, to drabbe liquid mud. Margaret might've not liked her name being dragged through mud so, though.
2 : where to get stoned is akin to a stoning
3 : my conversation is also often anatopical, in addition to being atypical and off topical.
4 : something about pulpy noir fiction requires cold, dreary rain, but i can't quite put my umbrella on it.
5 : or ghee, if you live in certain other places.
I find myself in a victorian chamber of an elevator. The ornate buttons tell me that the I'm in a building with three floors. The address in the scrap of parchment in my hand tells me that I need to visit someone on the fifth. I have no time, I can feel it gaining on me. The 8-bit digital floor readout is the only anatopism3 I can see. I press 2, and keep staring at the mirror opposite the floor beacon as it says I've arrived at 5. I walk out..
There's no music this time, unless you count the washing machine getting it on with the dishwasher. The strident metallic moans do have some sort of rhythm to it, if you listen carefully. Feeling a bit like an unwitting voyeur, I turn back and try to concentrate on my newspaper. An advertisement for food delivered by drones during traffic jams dances merrily in a corner. One would think that with all the advances we have with self-driving cars, humanity would've been rid of traffic jams by now. But apparently all it takes is for the strident morality hardcoded into the cars to decide that if they waited around things would resolve themselves with a minimal loss of life, while one kid with a go-cart drives around throwing thumb tacks and flipping people off. Then again, when people have everything they need inside cars, would you mind being in a jam? I turn off the display and sit in the darkness for a moment, letting my eyes acclimate before I open the door and step out..
Sitting quietly in a corner of the resort I see families come back from the slopes, crusted with flaky snow less than a day old. Ski resorts had become one of the more favoured holiday destinations after the zombie apocalypse, since the zoms had to trudge wearily up the cold slopes as skiers with everything ranging from mallets to chainsaws came hurtling down the hill at breakneck speed, their counterbalanced weaponry spelling armageddon for the bludsuckers. Funny that none had thought to go for the ski lifts, although they were some of the most fortified places in the resort one would imagine that under the overwhelming numbers that the zombies had it wouldn't be much of an issue. I would stick around a bit longer, but I'd been bitten recently and was feeling an itching in my calf. I took a last drag and stepped out...
It sure is nice to be a lichen. If you ask me, we're at the top of the evolutionary food chain. So what if these hairless apes build their roads and their cities? When you've been around for as long as we have, all of these constructs take on an ephemeral air, fleeting in their brief occupancy of time and space, but oshitoshit one of the buggers is going to poop on me again..
I
The paladin rolls a hundred and sixty sided die and shrugs at me, before announcing triumphantly, 'I buy Piccadilly.' I groan inwardly as I anticipate the inevitable. 'You retroactively owe me rent, Artificer!' I look at my own hand, with two rubies and a pair of dice blessed by the twins of fate and fortune. It sure would be nice if I could actually trust them for once. I looked at lady fate, sitting beside me and smiling sweetly as I staked my coins and rolled the dice, and knew that things were going to go horribly wrong...
'IT IS TIME.', said a voice, sepulchral in its intonation, dripping finality the way a waffle prepared by a doting grandmother drips syrup5.
'I know.', I told her, a bit more testily than I intended to. Jerking a finger at her companion, I said, 'I'm fine with you, its him that I have a bone to pick.'
--------------------
1 : perhaps the true origins of the word drabble. Or as Sir Terry would have said, to drabbe liquid mud. Margaret might've not liked her name being dragged through mud so, though.
2 : where to get stoned is akin to a stoning
3 : my conversation is also often anatopical, in addition to being atypical and off topical.
4 : something about pulpy noir fiction requires cold, dreary rain, but i can't quite put my umbrella on it.
5 : or ghee, if you live in certain other places.
