Here’s a palate cleanser for last week. A story I didn’t figure out until the very end.
DISCLAIMER: This work has not been edited beyond what was done in the video. The goal is to capture a story in a short amount of time and keep it as raw as possible.
The Story
People think I’m crazy. A lot of stories start out that way, don’t they?
Let me start again.
I am crazy. Better? Good. Let’s go with that for now. Not really sure who I’m talking to, but talking is always good. Because this city has a voice of its own, and if you don’t drown it out with yours, you just might get swallowed up. Too cryptic for you? Not from around here?
Let me start again.
Clean.
Name’s Clay. Like the kind you can sculpt and fire. I’ve been fired too many times, because I drift. Veer off course. I have trouble focusing. Not totally my fault, though. Remember that thing I said about the city having a voice? Well, it’s true. It drones through choking skies, burrows into the concrete we think is so impenatrable, then inevitably finds its way into the wires, the pipes. Any conduit really. Then it finds you. Your wires and pipes. Then you’re done.
I’m not ready to be done, so I talk. And if I keep talking, maybe I’ll find it. Shut it off. If it can be shut off.
I’m outside. Inside is worse, with the porous walls and so on. Muttering under my breath, into my collar, moving in a direction. Unlike the others out now, of which there aren’t many. They stalk, stutter, and stumble. If they aren’t doing that, they’re hacking their lungs out on account of the air being poisonous. See those smoke stacks up there? Filtration they say. To right the wrongs of our forefathers and what they did.
I know better. The water and food supply first to dull our minds by way of the microbiome, hitching a one-way ride up our vagus nerve to tickle our minds silly. When we stopped drinking, they went for the only thing we had left.
But I found a loophole. I visualize that word every time I say it. Anyway, I found other things to breathe. A byproduct of the city’s voice. The interplay of reverberations and moisture, just the right amount of lack of light, and you have something that coats your lungs. A mucous membrane you can feel. You ever feel your lungs? Me either, until that byproduct caught fire in my office while I tended to the last client I ever had. A sweet lady looking for her son. That’s all I know, because I cut it short to stop the fire. A lungful or two later, and here we are.
I hope she found her son.
I make my way down the street, trip over a few who won’t make it, because I always keep my head up. Looking down is a bad idea.
Footsteps pound behind me, so I must have done something wrong. I don’t bother looking, just dart into an alley and hope it works itself out. I grew up on these streets, so it does. I know, I know. You’re thinking that’s a bad line from a bad movie. And maybe it is, but don’t they say something about life imitating art? Or is the other way around.
The footsteps diminish, as does the shouting. I allow myself a deep breath and throw in a stretch for good measure. That’s when the city’s voice really hits me. It knows I’m coming. I can feel its feelers. Everywhere. They take down a few poor souls just outside the alley. The alley is another conduit. Anything is, really. And the voice shuttles down the alley like a bullet down the barrel of a gun.
BAM.
Dead.
My hand is held up like I’m the one who fired. This city really has a hold, I tell you. I move on before its grip squeezes tighter.
I take my time, even though I shouldn’t. Not sure how long this coating in my lungs will last. Never ventured out this far, this long. I hunker down behind a car just as the city’s voice distorts the air. I follow it as it passes over and cuts a man’s head clean off. He was done for already, bumping into a wall again like he was stuck on a loop.
There’s a hole in the street ahead. The way things are getting out here, I decide to take my chances. At least if my lungs lose their protection, I’ll be able to survive a little longer. I think.
But this hole doesn’t lead to a sewer like you’d expect. Underneath is a corridor, and at the end are two double doors with glass. And I see it. The voice.
It’s shaped like nothing else, organic but synthetic, and smoke rides on strands, pumping all that is vile into the air. I see the air, the walls gone as I walk down the hall. Smoke stacks rise in the distance with sheets of dead-skin smoke weaving around them.
The ground falls away, and I’m on a cliff, with no room to gain momentum, so I stop. Nothing else to do.
“Mr. Doyle,” I hear behind me.
I don’t bother looking. I feel something on my neck, and I turn up my collar. Too late. I throw myself at this thing, to save myself, to save that poor old woman’s son, to save the world.
“Easy,” another voice but similar, like a copy.
Easy for you to say, I think as I pummel this sick machine with fists of blood. Then the colors change, no longer a smoldering sky. A color I can’t describe takes over, then another. So many they’re hard to distinguish. Clean and pure, with edges that remind me of the smoke strands, but just for a second, until they’re gone like a bad dream.
Then I see her, among all this. The sweet lady. She looks at me and smiles. I think I smile back. “Sorry about last time,” I say. “Tell me about your son again.”
Because I know I can do anything now.
“I found him,” she says with tears in her eyes.