This is a secular city, built on holy bones.
We’re on the edge of another fissure. Nothing so grand as a revolution. But the grey looming face of the clock, the ticks that cut up time into neat seconds, they belong to the old gods now.
Bodies fill the city, dreams fixed like hats to their heads.
This is a stalemate. The swollen library, gorged with books and words, looms at the city’s centre like a closed eye.
The air is thick with stagnation. Swarms of people clot the streets. They go so slowly. Words heavy and clumsy as bumble bees, flung out for anyone to hear. “It is! 24, it’s the general!” Or else, “Spare any change?”, like a hook that beds itself into people’s skin. Guiltily, they dig it out with their fingernails.
The past is bleeding through, like a scar that will not heel. The tarmac wears away, beneath our feet, eroding into Victorian cobblestone, so long covered up and forgotten. Days pile on top of each other, burying us beneath them, numb as falling snow. They build into terms, years, generations.
And we are caught, in the blistering moment. Time, condensed and frozen, in an innocuous sentence, in a leather bound book.
Could the words, so long left for dead, shed their hard black shells and come alive? Could the city shed the obligations of the past and expectations of the future… and reach into the present?
