New People of the Flat Earth by Brian Short

Author:Brian Short [Short, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: New People of The Flat Earth
ISBN: 9781912248018
Publisher: Watkins Media
Published: 2017-10-24T04:00:00+00:00

SIXTEEN

Fake City

[Outside Time]

No, no, that was the airless quality. That was not a sun. The sun dot city dot dot up in the airless quality; could not help but think of it as she. She?

That was not a sun up there. There was something familiar about it, yes, but it wasn’t the sun. There was light, but no source of light, and the light was even and wan and somehow limpid, if a bit thick. And it was not as bad, and it was not as dark, and it was not as difficult as it once seemed or felt, to walk these airless blocks as if I were still living… yet there was an emptiness to it also, a bodiless-ness. No. No. I couldn’t feel my feet. I could feel the feet were there, but not feel anything through them, detached by the airless quality. And in the back-forth-ness of even, persistent movement I found how a false stability may be maintained. It was to a point effective, but not to other purpose; I was only walking. I had nowhere to go. The city was changeable, a construct within a bubble – it had proven that much already, as the forms it took came into focus, shifted, and then were gone – and on its canvas were put in order a variety of similar forms, all having their relations, composed and repurposed, composed and disassembled, where persons, flocked like grouplings, moved, moved with traffic, moved again to follow the signal, where persons then waited with the signal, and waited… It didn’t seem so important to feel through my feet anymore, all considered. Just that my feet were there. The distance between them and the rest of me allowed a directionless wandering, a wakening, and that was as much as a body could allow for. How to hold a person together? That was a question. Enough to keep a form? Another question. But with as loose a step as this – it was so like feeling myself – or no, if not feeling; or no, if not myself; then – a fish, perhaps, without a fin. A sucker.

But this was not my body. It was hardly that. As best as I could manage. So where was the body? A thing could not be gotten over. And also: where was the mind? The real mind? Oh, that thing in the sky? This was not a mind. That was another thing. And where… damn it, where had Finch gone off to? Yeah, I knew… I knew where he’d gone to, as much as I could know about that. I wanted to tell him how he’d got off too easy, disappearing like that, off to the smoky void – though near twenty years of following me around in ghostly form, all considered, had been anything, I’m sure, but easy. But what I did not now want to admit, how with my “friend” gone, I had maybe started going a bit unraveled. Un-rav-el-ed. Bits and parts and pieces of it, all a-scatter.

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