Every morning tired people brought paper cups to their faces and poured brown water into their mouths. They entered elevators and looked straight ahead. An elevator is a compartment sheathed inside its building like an ingrown hair hosting the pus of people: the janitor in the basement; the security guard in the lobby; the Jr. Executive contemplating his life on a ledge; the CEO groaning over a toilet.
When the elevator doors opened, they did not think of Moses parting the seas, or the vertical kiss of vulva. This particular century lacked symbolism. People simply stepped forward towards their offices. Passing the panes of glass, they did not see their faces fast-forwarded in the soil, returning to the earth in a long awaited maggot’s homecoming. They did not see the eternal stare of their own empty eye sockets. They did not see.
Here is the sound of fingers on a keyboard, tapping, typing. The Jr. Executive toggles from cell to cell in his spreadsheet. He deletes a column just to see how it feels. He looks out the window at the smoggy smear called day. The traffic jerks below, honking. He enters a few figures, fingers tapping—the sound of light rain on a still pond. Somewhere, he thinks, there is a still pond. A frog sighs and plops into the water. Plop.
The acceleration by which objects fall towards earth is one G, or 9.80665 m/s². An asteroid is much larger than a meteoroid, thus, human beings were more concerned with the former. Such was the hierarchy of relevance. Asteroid QQ47 was believed to hit the earth that day, having the effect of 20 million Hiroshima bombs. At the time, humans had difficulty processing such numbers. They estimated a 1 in 909,000 chance of QQ47 crashing into earth, employing a metaphor in which the universe is a haystack, and the earth a needle.
Plop. The sound of shit—its birth so stubborn, its descent so lethargic—it blew a vessel. The CEO grunts in pain, wipes his sweaty brow, and folds the Wall Street Journal into a manageable lump under his arm. As he’s washing his hands at the sink, through his peripheral vision, the CEO sees a dark blur drop pass the window. Five minutes later, back at his desk, he hears the faint whine of sirens below.
In the penultimate seconds before the Jr. Executive meets the pavement, he notices his tie fluttering in the wind. Seen in slow motion, its undulations were of a charmed snake, each bend marking the beginning of a cursive letter. So lovely, he thinks, I never noti—
Some thoughts were not made to be finished. A large pool of blood surrounding the body constantly took on new contours in its expansion. One had to be agile in assessing its shape and size. It simply got bigger and bigger, darker and darker, like the growing shadow on the ground.
When the elevator doors opened, they did not think of Moses parting the seas, or the vertical kiss of vulva. This particular century lacked symbolism. People simply stepped forward towards their offices. Passing the panes of glass, they did not see their faces fast-forwarded in the soil, returning to the earth in a long awaited maggot’s homecoming. They did not see the eternal stare of their own empty eye sockets. They did not see.
Here is the sound of fingers on a keyboard, tapping, typing. The Jr. Executive toggles from cell to cell in his spreadsheet. He deletes a column just to see how it feels. He looks out the window at the smoggy smear called day. The traffic jerks below, honking. He enters a few figures, fingers tapping—the sound of light rain on a still pond. Somewhere, he thinks, there is a still pond. A frog sighs and plops into the water. Plop.
The acceleration by which objects fall towards earth is one G, or 9.80665 m/s². An asteroid is much larger than a meteoroid, thus, human beings were more concerned with the former. Such was the hierarchy of relevance. Asteroid QQ47 was believed to hit the earth that day, having the effect of 20 million Hiroshima bombs. At the time, humans had difficulty processing such numbers. They estimated a 1 in 909,000 chance of QQ47 crashing into earth, employing a metaphor in which the universe is a haystack, and the earth a needle.
Plop. The sound of shit—its birth so stubborn, its descent so lethargic—it blew a vessel. The CEO grunts in pain, wipes his sweaty brow, and folds the Wall Street Journal into a manageable lump under his arm. As he’s washing his hands at the sink, through his peripheral vision, the CEO sees a dark blur drop pass the window. Five minutes later, back at his desk, he hears the faint whine of sirens below.
In the penultimate seconds before the Jr. Executive meets the pavement, he notices his tie fluttering in the wind. Seen in slow motion, its undulations were of a charmed snake, each bend marking the beginning of a cursive letter. So lovely, he thinks, I never noti—
Some thoughts were not made to be finished. A large pool of blood surrounding the body constantly took on new contours in its expansion. One had to be agile in assessing its shape and size. It simply got bigger and bigger, darker and darker, like the growing shadow on the ground.
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