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In Bestower of Powers, The City, Making Distinctions For Self
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Jul 20, 2019 06:03
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| # ¿ Jul 20, 2025 17:48 |
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Bestower of Powers, The City, Making Distinctions For Self Cycles Delivered 1192 words He felt his neck slump forward and he startled awake. He couldn’t remember how he got here. He found himself in a metal and plastic chair, one of many along a light gray wall, the kind only found in the shittiest airports. Designed to push you out with uncomfortable angles, lined on top of thin carpet glued to concrete floors. Designed by some corporate gently caress. Rubbing at the crick in his neck, he looked over at a balding man in a disheveled suit snoring beside him. He thought to himself it could have even been this corporate gently caress. “Dax Stephenson!” A voice rang out and the groggy man turned his achy neck, squinting towards a desk at the far end of the room. Dax lifted himself from his chair, leaving the businessman to the rest of the bench. He waded through a maze of legs coming from people passed out in rows specifically designed to maximize occupancy over comfort. He’d been looking at all the snoozing faces crowded in the benches, trying to get his bearings, when he came to a desk and jumped back at the figure behind it. “Welcome, Mr. Stephenson, to the City.” A crocodile’s head emerged from a sharp pants suit. The crocodile wasn’t even looking at Dax, just typing away at the screen sitting atop her white desk. “What city? Wait, what the gently caress are y- Who the gently caress are you?!” “The City. A client access manager. My name is right here,” she tapped a burgundy plastic plate with white glyphs. They were a hawk, a stick, and some wavy lines. “You’ll have the same job you had on the surface, but you’ll have to remove your… accessories,” Dax never thought he would see condescension painted across the face of a crocodile, but there it was as she pointed at his gauge earrings and lip ring, “and wear this…” she pushed across a gray shirt and ash shorts. A boiling part of Dax wanted to toss the uniform into the sleeping masses behind him and shove his middle finger into the crocodile’s face, but there was something about the room that sieved that rage through his feet. He grumpily latched onto the clothes and grumbled under his breath, “fuckin’ repto-Eichmann. What the gently caress is even going on,” as he walked through the sliding glass doors beside the desk. In a rack directly in front of him was a road bike, with charcoal messenger bags slung over the seat. Dax numbly stared at it as she retorted in a raised voice. “You died, idiot.” *** It felt like he’d been winding his way through these streets for years. Concrete canyons, carved by paved rivers, filled with people shuffling through whatever monotonous task they felt compelled to complete. The City was always busy. It was like San Francisco poo poo its population onto the flat grid of a Midwestern capital no one heard of. The seasons passed, but the only noticeable change was from cloudy, to rainy, to cold and rainy, back to cloudy. He missed his old mp3 player. He also missed the reckless abandon he felt flying through Denver. Erratic weather, poorly planned streets jutting off in every angle, lovely drivers from every corner of the US… they fueled his angst as he pedaled to the beat of whatever punk band thrummed in his ears. That was all lost here. The chaos that made him feel alive was replaced with the metaphysical equivalent of unseasoned Quaker Oatmeal. Even worse, one job melded into the next. As soon as he dropped off his package, the recipient would hand him something else to deliver. From one gray monolith to the next. One gray uniformed hand to another. He occupied himself by attempting to hum songs he struggled to remember. These were the songs he used to use as a lens to project himself into the world. But they were incomplete now. There was a time he could belt them out in the shower or stumbling down Colfax… He was trying to think why, as he dragged himself into another elevator at the base of another lobby ripped from the most outdated hospital in America. He pressed the button for the 40th floor and stood as people ambled off with every stop. He wanted to be angry about forgetting the last verse to Crack Rock Steady, but he just couldn’t. He didn’t have the energy for it. He ate, he slept, he cycled, but there was nothing left. The bell rang for his floor and the door opened into fluorescent hallways. Dax rubbed his fully healed earlobe as he dragged himself past a series of closed doors. The loss of those lyrics forced him to ask himself many questions, like why those lyrics were important to him. Or were they? That question brought him to his delivery. Gray wall, white door, silver knob, privacy glass with a snake, an ankh, and four sticks painted in black. Dax didn’t even knock. Everyone always expected his delivery and just held out their waiting hand before shoving something out with the other. “Hello, Mr. Stephenson,” said a snake man in elaborate Egyptian clothing. It sat at a nondescript wooden desk. It was jarring. He couldn’t remember the last time someone spoke to him. Or the last time he saw something other than a gray uniform. “Uhhh, hi. Package… for you?” “Yes, thank you, Mr. Stephenson. How are you feeling?” “Yeah, I mean, okay?” “Good. Excellent. Yes, the wheel is almost done turning for you.” “The wheel?” The shock of an actual conversation wore off, “What are you talking about? Who are you?” “They say I bestow powers but, really, I just give people the chance to understand themselves. I wouldn’t worry too much about me, though. This is a time to turn inward. There’s no balancing those scales if the heart is heavy with anger.” “But I used to be angry for a reason…” “Why does that matter anymore? You’re dead.” *** It was so long ago, maybe even years, yet that conversation felt like yesterday. More and more those questions he kept asking himself were easily answered. He came to realize what he needed to shed from himself. There used to be so much disdain, but it was slowly replaced with acceptance. It was cold and rainy. Dax was delivering another package. Through the lobby and halls, he came to a door. It took him long enough, but he could read the glyphs easily now. “Nutrition Resource Management.” In it, he recognized the face of the disheveled businessman from his first day. A knowing smile crept across Dax’s face, as if this place was revealing itself to him. He rode towards his next drop off. The building from his first day. He began humming a song, nothing he knew or recognized, just something that came naturally. Tkchunk. The chain on the bike snapped. The front wheel stopped rotating and began to skid. The bike catapulted itself out from under Dax and threw him into the curb. His neck slumped forward and he began to drift off. He couldn’t remember how he got here.
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Jul 21, 2019 17:43
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Thanks, AA. I know exactly which sentences you're talking about. Really appreciate the feedback. First time any of my writing has been called poetic or beautiful.
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Jul 24, 2019 08:26
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Thanks for the feedback Djeser and DZ. much appreciated.
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Jul 25, 2019 05:51
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I'm in for this week. No numbers or anything.
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Jul 26, 2019 00:33
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Lucky Inside Out by Spoon (Link to video) No flash rules or extra words. Breaking the law of averages 777 words “Time’s gone inside out…” 4.6 billion years in the forge. Of fire and water. Of hammer and tongs. Of tempering and sharpening. What are the chances of all those happening? Of the things that could have happened, but didn’t? Of everything that brought us here? “Time gets distorted when…” Is it fatalist to think that the pieces just fell into place outside of anyone’s control? Even for a brief moment? That it wasn’t through the chemoreceptors of an amoeba in an ancient, warm, gooey pool? Or a primate wrestling with the idea of food trapped inside the rocks left behind by a rotting body? “There’s intense gravity.” I don’t want it to be. If it is, then it’s too easy to fall down the rabbit hole of probabilities. Of X dictating Y and how that can become an equation. Enough equations and then you have existence in a neat, little algorithmic bow. Existence is already commoditized in its current chaos. Wrapping it up and packaging it in plastic would just be more fuel for the flame. “I don’t got time for holy rollers…” Was that first flame shared eons ago made by the same people who polymerize carbon and alkylate crude oil today? Were there others who saw what that flame did and felt a fear and anger rise up in them? Were they compelled to do something but failed? “Though they may wash my feet, I won’t be their soldier.” Even during the night, with just a full moon staring wide-eyed above, the humidity out here sticks to you. There’s something about that humidity. It makes the smells cling to your nose. Making you breath in that earthy, pungent smell with every rise of your lungs. It reminds me that I’m protecting something else. “There’s intense gravity in you…” The fan blades stopped whirring, but the engine kept chugging through its throaty rhythm in neutral. It was enough to let the ambient sound sneak in. The buzz of unseen bugs. The high-pitched periodic call of spring peepers, punctuated by the deeper bursts of their bullfrog cousins. Something larger moving reeds aside as it starts gliding through water. It felt like a concert. “I’m just your satellite.” Could those sounds be a part of such an equation? Can the growth rate of the cypress and the increasing water levels be used to project the shifting border of the lands? How can something as profound as nature be reduced to numbers and percentages? It can’t be true. It’s not true. To think otherwise would be the same as accepting the world they want to create. The one teetering on the edge of collapse and ruin. “Oooh I know that time’s gone inside out, And it’s now only like I told ya…” The excitement is welling up inside me. It’s not in my stomach or in my heart. It’s somewhere deep in my chest. It builds as the moment draws near. That’s how I know existence is more than anatomy. There is no anticipation organ sitting in that spot. That feeling is coming from something else. “Mmm, though they wash my feet, They do not make me complete.” We lost something with every step forward. Those prehistoric fire makers dragged everybody else with them, whether we liked it or not. And they brought us into a world of prisons. Trapped by history. Trapped by society. Trapped by the need for the best outcomes, calculated by averages across people reduced to the letter “n,” in an academic paper. “Break out of character for me…” Is it fatalist to feel lucky? Is it supposed to be a feeling of reveling in the dice falling just right? Or is it just gratitude for the agency of myself and the people who share my purpose? Or is that feeling a reward from something else? The light comes first. A yellow burst from the middle of the facility. The sound quickly follows and it reverberates across the water in the swamps. Then the yellow burst quickly turns orange and spreads. “Time keeps on going when, We’ve got nothing else to give…” Another testament to those forward steps falls. The metal and concrete, standing in the face of the vast swamplands surrounding it, collapses in on itself with the sound of a dying behemoth. Grating and moaning as the fire burns it from the inside. They may have created it, but I’ll fight with it. I’ll drag us back to those first steps. It’s hard not to bask in that warm, orange glow and think about everything it took to reach this point. And, yeah, I do feel lucky. “We’ve got nothing left to give…”
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Jul 27, 2019 01:50
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In
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Jul 31, 2019 21:28
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Libra Sun Virgo Moon Help Me, Help you 319 words "Don't you have a fuckin' life to go back to? Like some shithole apartment?" "Buddy, I got all the time in the world. I'm here for you." "Shove it. You're here to roll me. I got nothin' which means I'm givin' your monkey suit wearin' rear end nothin' too." "You don't know what you have until someone asks for it. Just do me a favor and look at these..." "gently caress outta here with those." "Come on. Do you know how long it takes to organize one of these files to bring in here?" "Like I give a gently caress." "Listen. I don't care what you're doing for Slow Eye Steve. I know all about it-" "You don't know poo poo or you would have arrested me. No charge, no knowledge. Keep fishing, fucker." "I know you're burning buildings in Hamtramck and your rooms in the Russell are a front for drug deals..." "gently caress off." "Oooh a little less feisty now, are we? As I said, I don't care what you do for Steve. I want something else entirely." "What?" "Truth and justice. You were down river when Eddie got shot, correct?" "Which Eddie?" "Which Eddie... Eddie Castro. Chief Victor Castro's nephew. I know you were there, because these pictures show it." "Yeah. What about it?" "Well, who shot him? Cause he was doing a job with you-" "I never said poo poo about us doing jobs together." "Donnie. Please. Who shot him?" "What's in it for me?" "Depending on what you got, I could be convinced to not pass along your whereabouts to our mutual friends from Armenia." "You crooked gently caress." "Is there any other kind of cop from Detroit?" *** "Did you get it?" "I always do, Chief. Never in doubt." "Make a copy of the tape and give one to me. Get the other over to Slow Eye Steve. Keep Donnie here." "Well, I guess Donnie's about to get an unexpected guest."
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Aug 5, 2019 02:48
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| # ¿ Jul 20, 2025 17:48 |
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Thanks for the crits earlier. I should have went with my first instinct and dropped the lyrics.
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Aug 5, 2019 02:50
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