Profundicity

Then the hotel slips and the door exists twice within the same moment.  

Now, of course, its windows are boarded and sealed shut. Though if you know when to shove, the idea of the door will sometimes give way.

A few streets away, back into the oncecity, there is the memory of a hotel. It used to be somewhere a man of my age might find somewhere to sit down and eat.

The job done, I realise I am tired. I haven’t eaten since the evening before, and my stomach is hollow and empty. 

This one is a river. The chill extrudes from the water. Like ice under a fingernail.

The borders aren’t always in the city. Most of the safer zones, though, slipped between the moment inside urban spaces. Something about people being there. It didn’t fix in the outskirts, in the suburbs. Fewer dead. 

I look back and the sky has slipped into a monochrome phase. The steps are still visible.

The border is cold. Different pieces of it inhabit their own temperature. Like micro-climates. This one is chill, a mist-ridden cold that seeps under clothing and into the skin. It’ll leave a rash. 

The sky hasn’t been the same since. It’s the thing you notice first, whether you look up or keep your eyes where they belong, trailing along the ground like a good soldier. It shifts, moves between colour grades like a child’s kaleidoscope. Tonal mosaics, patterns behind the eyes.  

I squint, and the true colour reasserts itself. Ochres, orange and yellow. 

The sky above the borderland is a murky smear.

Something cracks and skitters. Something moves in the grey. Was this something’s child? Is there a parent out there, hungry for my blood? Some and thing are not specifics, do not represent a moment to panic, to chill. He saw to that. We saw to that.

My foot stops on the border. Something breaks. 

He is alive, somewhen. Still. 

I know those things because I stood outside the doors and I watched his face melt into the air, into the wind blowing in from the street and into the colours of the walls in the lobby. Staining them red, drawing a dirty yellow caul over the world. 

These are good questions. 

Behind him, he swears the cool air of the morning was still drifting into the lobby. He turned, looking away from the tree for a moment, and the                whole                                world                                                was                                                                                                                                                                                                gone.