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andrew s. taylor : “why the letter to your congressman will not be read”
There was no sunlight, nor memory of sunlight. The light came from the fog itself, which was grudgingly luminescent, like a milky cataract watching from across a dark room. The fog had swallowed the sun like the last grape on a dry vine, and with it also the memory of the sun. It pressed its oily fingers into ear-holes and nose-holes. The memories within came out easily in a series of stains and smudges.
The people worked, and dirty, dank angels in the form of other people walked the streets without umbrellas. The day drove on, but without the sun there was no time as well. The fog had swallowed time and refused to disgorge it. In place of time there was something called Miasm, which flowed slowly and formlessly.
At some point in the afternoon a woman who was young, and yet not young, stopped working, reclined back in her chair, and began to listen. She could hear her own blood pumping through the insides of her ears. She has never heard it before, except sometimes when she was falling asleep. And, as sometimes happened then, she could also hear a babble of voices, voices in her head that spoke the sounds of words without the words themselves, voices that would chew and ruminate upon the textures and rhythms that words were made of. And then, deeper still, beneath the blood and beneath the voices, she heard something else, a singular voice, less human than any she had ever known, but nonetheless of her and inside of her. And she remembered, as her eyes became moist, the thing which she could never remember when awake.
She looked out of her office window, into the fog, which had covered the buildings, obscuring their square-lidded eyes, their office-sockets, normally alive and sparkling from the busy movements of minute dolls within them, and then she turned and scanned the office, where the people fidgeted and whispered, and she thought she saw a fine dust on their lips and their arms. The dust, she believed, of eternal wakefulness. She stood up from her desk, wiped her damp brow, and, without a word to her colleagues, departed. She rode the elevator twenty flights down to the street level, and exited the building. She stepped into the fog, which was the city, and which contained, like afterthoughts of discoloration, occasional cars and buildings.
After a long period of time, she arrived at a bridge between two masses of land. The land had been swallowed by the fog, and the bridge hung suspended, like some form of foreign punctuation, between regions of mist. Water flowed far beneath her feet. Angels from the Empyrean, soiled and listless, passed her as she stood gazing down into the flow of water, the only thing which moved and which promised escape from the fog. The woman unbound her scarf, released it, and watched it swim downwards, away from her, like some blood-hued aquatic creature returning home after a long absence. Piece by piece, she removed all of her clothes and discarded them. One by one, they floated away into the grey, rippling and undulating in quiet abandon. Naked, pale, her body curved like a giant finger aimed at the emptiness, she closed her eyes and opened her mouth. A rasping sound arose from deep within her chest. A smoky form emerged from her mouth, spilling upwards. Milk flowed from her flat breasts, and trickled in weeping rivulets over her distended ribcage. When she finally stepped from the edge of the bridge into the fog, she did not fall, but rather simply dissipated, like a cloud that had only momentarily assumed a human shape, and was now returning to the ebb and flow of the heavenly gases. Nothing was heard to plash upon the water below.
Somewhere nearby, an angel coughed, and dropped his cigarette onto the pavement. From the ash stain grew, in the weeks that followed, sharp and asymmetrical flower-forms, fashioned from shale, mica-schist, and obsidian.
The bridge remained, and said nothing.
That evening the fog grew tired, and its light began to dim. In its fatigue, it withdrew from doorways and alleys, and pulled back from cool rooftops, chased by the white and fiery steam from curling metal smokestacks. The fog, feeling the pain of its waning energies, opened its pearl-colored eye and looked down on the city. The eye was spotted, and the city was contained inside it, upside down and in miniature. This inverse city moved across the sky, slowly observing itself. Then the eye slid down behind the skyscrapers, pulling the last tentacles of fog with it, and the angels that remained dissolved, unobtrusively, into whatever crevasses or hallowed caverns they could find behind the closed bathroom doors of the seedier bars.
The city slept. The water flowed.
This was a dream, only a dream, and you need not be concerned.
Andrew S. Taylor is the Associate Editor of the online literary magazine Menda City Review. His work, both fiction & non-fiction, has appeared in Ellery Queen, Pindeldyboz, Mad Hatter's Review, Menda City Review, Peridot Books, The Cafe Irreal, American Book Review, Ghetto Blaster Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, Cyrano's Journal, & Anime Insider. He lives in Brooklyn, NYC.
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{ issue four |