[Although the following text is a sketch for an upcoming investigation, it stands as a work on its own. Also, whilst reading it, you are invited to listen this track.]
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Enchantingly, the city lay before our man, decorous in its virginal smog.
Its tallest buildings spoke in accents, and its vehicles hummed, bleeping the glitched permutations of a microchip. The city was all sound and motion, but it never moved, never, as the sun came down swiftly beyond it: descending to its watery seat, once more as it always, always has.
Our man observed from an elevated location.
Lights ignited, one at a time, then they lit up in groups: circuitry, glinting and exploding. In minutes the city was wholly lit, buzzing, and its vehicles multiplied, rodent-like and enchanting, grinding to an unperceivable throb, like ink-black bubbles glittering at the lips of a deep, deep mouth––all of it nearly swallowed.
Lights beamed skyward and bulbs blinked down from passing airplanes. All wired.
For a time everything increased, at first gradually, then rapidly, like dividing cells. The whole body was endless spasm. Ceaseless eroticism. The city lit life: a spray of molten bullets in a train across the night sky.
Flash.
All of it was luminous body, a trillion bulbs hissing electrically on the lip of a deep, deep mouth. Breathing in its observers. Breathing them up to the electric blackness of its surrounding mountains of abandoned caves and hollow trees. Aluminium mountains where cold wind flies off snow and ice, howling pain down to the root.
There: scream-black steel is roaring quick on a highway.
Inside the driver is a thumb tapping the steering wheel and a stubbed cigarette. Beside him was a skeleton clutching a purse, its transparent hair tied up in a padlock. No words, just a beat and speed, just like that, smashed off the road.
Blood. Blood. Blood.
Blood and dripping fuel.
There: two men on motorcycles.
For each there was a leather jacket and a weapon. They rode up to a building dozing on a quiet street. Motorcycles hushed, they leaped off like horsemen. Through the gate and up three floors like rats, then through the door and down the corridor:
Bang. Bang. Bang.
Bloody bed sheets while the high-pitched drone of motorcycles erases everything.
There: A woman opens the door of her car.
She drops her body into it and finds someone there. Deserted parking lot, and a blade through the waistband.
Snip. Snip. Snip.
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Then our man shut his eyes.
Behind his eyelids he saw the entire thing burn. All of it – with incinerating ash, with much burning – was finally annihilated and blown away.
All the roads suddenly gone. All the iron suddenly molten.
All the bulbs suddenly liquid. All the sand suddenly glassed.
Then our man opened his eyes: the city purred vigorously from within its virginal smog, glowing like a fog-light beneath its mantle, like a smile pushed into a pillow.
Sprawl. Drone. No end.
idiotic investigations 