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Trajectory


by stephen hastings-king


 

B emerges from a context that disappears.  At first absences increase element by element: body at a time; building at a time; block at a time. Soon the world is on film that is burning.   

 

B commandeers a car and flees headlong into a post-industrial wilderness.  He is the momentum of his flight.  His interior is a container suspended in engine sounds. 

 

B hurtles between parallel white lines, figure over a ground that the night has erased. The showers of radiation from solar flares are zones of scatter from other movies; fragments of other characters and settings, jumbles of motivation and soundtracks.

 

When B looks straight ahead the vanishing point recedes and pulls the space he moves through into a long thin cone.  Above, illuminated by a bizarre reddish glow, changing surface tensions draw themselves as involutions in the flesh of the sky.  Amidst the pinpoint lights of disappeared industry cracking towers are spider webs that trap the ruins of radio signals.  Ahead the white lines are waving like threads on water.

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