Under the Seppuku Sun
The city suffers from sleep apnea. Before it drowns in the loins-heavy
languor of a dream, it crashes to the surface with the wailing laughter
of graveyard shift workers, the squeal of tires and whiney exhausts
from rice rockets, barking fits from paranoid dogs, indeterminate
clashes of steel on steel in the distance. The unceasing will to live
strobes through the mind, like ball lightening. Breath catches, seminal
fluids release, the edge, now disembarking for Anaheim, Azusa, and
Cucamunga on Track 15. Eyes flash-shutter. Darkness prevades. The sound
of static coos softly, a lullaby. The will to live drives his legs to
movement, his mind to madness, his face to twitching. He dresses,
leaves the duplex, its skin abrasive against his own, and he wanders,
seemingly, aimless.
His legs lead him past the dark windows of houses--houses seemingly
benign of sorrow, holding their disease close to their hearts, as they
feign sleep--underneath pools of streetlight, comfort zones for
adherents of the bogeyman, to the amber waves of intersections. Past
the garish sign of a 24-Hour convenience store, empty spare a black
woman waiting at the telephone booth and the indifferent existence of
the nightclerk, scratching lottery tickets to pass the time. Past the
raucous echoes of a dive, its parking lot filled with pick-up trucks.
Past miles of darkened buildings and concrete, poured to coagulate the
soil's veins--its death a canvas for industry.
He stops abruptly at a train crossing; its bell clanging, candy-caned
rocker arm falling, red lights blinking. With no fanfare, an Amtrak
train races by. Warm, aquarium light burns across his retinas, sparse
shadows of humanity look through him--a mere amusement en route to
paradise.
The rocker arm raises back up, bell stills, and lights die, leaving him
to wonder if the train was ever there or just an itinerant thought
borne from a fever dream.
Under overpasses, still-life apartment complexes, digital reader boards
flashing 0% Down savings at abandoned car dealerships, tassles
fluttering with the breeze.
Earthly amusements eventually seem to bore him. As he ascends the dark
lane winding up a hill, he keeps checking skyward, as if an answer has
yet to reveal itself to him. The answer does not come. Nor will it
ever. But he continues to watch, as he seats himself on a wooden bench
in a hillside park, his only hope.
Though the hill is not of great height, the city appears so small, so
tame. A distant trinket in a snowglobe, waiting to be shaken up by a
9.0 earthquake to sink its miserable existence back into the earth,
whence it came. Lights stutter in the distance. Silence wraps him in
its embrace, making him aware of himself. Echoes of the past haunt his
blood. Each heartbeat, another pang of regret knifes through his mind.
Two hemispheres of a brain; combatants of a private war.
He watches the harsh darkness pale into the gray of dawn, before the
sun rises like a gunshot, the unified wings of geese fleeing southward.
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