Archive for the ‘Authors’ Category
On the Monorail
Monday, March 26th, 2007
Leave your half-empty, half-cooled styro of coffee as an offering to the Man on the Monorail. He’s said to ride the fluorescent aisles of the metrotran ceaselessly, always seeking — never finding — a platform that isn’t just a transfer point, a destination that isn’t just a place on the way to somewhere else.
Riding, always riding, never to see a landscape that doesn’t have his own Perspex-reflected face layered over it. The mirror-chrome office pylons like tethering posts for clouds. Fields of solar panels stretching away to the horizon like an ocean of gleaming shadow. Immense self-assembled geodesics like jewel-faceted mountains. Always the image of his eye like a moon in a noon-blue sky.
The stories say he lives on stale donuts and cup noodles out of the machines in the back cars of the intercity routes. The stories say the conductors turn a blind eye; the stories say he used to be one of them, still wears the blue coat, stripped of buttons or insignia, still mutters the station names to himself in an endless loop that might be curses, might be prayer.
Out you go, down the stairs, through the streets, away into the crowd, while he rides, settled on the vinyl seat patched with peeling tape, head drowsing against textured aluminum panels etched and markered with signatures and slogans, tags that label the world with names. If he has a name, no one remembers it. The monorail glides, night-silent, through the city skyline, and he rides. He rides, seeking.
From One Building Super to Another
Monday, March 26th, 2007
Hey Marty,
This is kind of crazy, but I think the new tenants in 3C are mad scientists. I can’t prove it, but I’ve made a list of things that I have noticed lately. Tell me what you think.
- I bumped into Velma (that’s the wife) in the hall. She complimented me on my sense of decoration. They have never been inside my apartment.
- Ben, the husband, wears goggles all the time.
- I never hear them having sex.
- There is now a giant robot head stuck in the stairwell between the second and third floor. No idea where that came from.
- Their mailbox is always full of Sharper Image catalogs. And nothing else.
- Their cat shoots laser beams out of its eyes. I saw it kill a pigeon on the fire escape while I was having a smoke.
- They drive a zeppelin. It’s moored to the top of the building. Is that even legal?
Maybe I’m just being paranoid, but the last couple in 3C turned out to worship some kind of giant squid. It took forever to mop up the slime after they skipped town.
–Hank