FREAK TIME

I turn my face into the wind and it cuts my cheeks with shards of rain. The new-growth smell of spring has been washed away by the clouds which feed it and there is nothing left to taste but thick humidity. A train clambers its way into the station on sinewy limbs, its jagged teeth gnashing, and long forked tongue flicking spittle at those in a rush who stand too close to the edge of the platform.

The station is built into a shallow ravine, open to the sky and terribly overgrown. Fairy, devil, and animal alike all have to dodge the sheet of rain falling from the awning like a screen, promising sticky discomfort if one isn’t quick enough.

Of the forty odd people boarding at this stop, ten of them get away unscathed, another ten see their shoulders soaked, and the other twenty think they’re safe until they take their bags off their shoulders and see its contents have become mournfully waterlogged.

I go in with the thin, muddy puddles on the floor and make my home under people’s boots. This is the quiet town hall, the city-wide coffee house, the flesh and steel procession between lives. I can’t exactly commune with my constituents as they are accustomed to, so instead I listen in as they speak with their hovering history.

In the distance the earth and the sky shake like glass, brittle and prone to breaking against the dissonance of too many realities stacked on top of each other. Incidents like these are all too common as of late, so nobody raises their heads to investigate the quake, nor flinches away from the teeth rattling sound.

Miles away, a tear widens and swallows the intersection of Gunset and 7th. 23 people vanish, along with the front facing apartments of two walk-ups, 30 square feet of concrete, asphalt, and earth, 4 buggies, 2 trees, a squirrel, countless insects, a stray dog, and the rain caught in the area as it fell. After the sickening second of reprieve, rain falls again on the stricken faces of those left behind and a small pond grows in the crater below.

This is not the first chunk ripped out of this city, but it is the largest yet. The most undeniable. Indisputable evidence that the Resonance is real, and can reach everywhere. Even here. The train scrambles down the track and over the bridge into the center of a city with MAGIC so deep it swallows the smell of the rain. The Riverstrip is a paragon of a place where I both thrive and choke as they live on within me.

It is a colony built on bodies. Life filters through it like a sieve.

I run through its little hills where its rivers used to be, soak into its bricks, bake into its bread, smear claims with paint over every surface. I am the warp and they are the weft, and we weave these streets and avenues together.