Snippet: Beckoning
I am alone in a sea of life. Not the people, those are shambling corpses. It's the bridge. The buildings. The sidewalks. They pulse. Sway. Tremble. They live, permanent memories given form. No blood. No organs. Just being. Holding us gently, or not. We the inanimate beings that move without seeing, and shuffle without purpose. Ghost ships sailing across the sensitive concrete skin. Cracks like veins, open to the chill and neglect. Open to the sky. But never allowed to touch. Closed to the wonder but wondrous in itself. Lonely, like me. A bridge crawls with cars but it is the pigeons who set the music. The air might be empty of noise save for that gentle song. The cars alive with purpose that their passengers do not share. dead eyes. Not headlamps in the fog but deafness in the darkness. Given up a sense while the others are stripped away. My forehead on the glass. Which am I? Corpse, or dirge? Author's note: These snippets are unedited free-writing exercises that I use as a way to shift my brain into a creative state. I use Lynda Barry's What It Is YouTube timed exercises (usually 9 minutes worth of writing) for these. They are handwritten in a composition notebook, and then typed up here. As I transcribe them, I do tiny grammar and spelling checks, but the overall "clarity" (if you can call it that) of the exercise is left as-is.