Strepsiptera

Under feet built of echoes the dead town sags, dreading and melting under the strain of the ages. Building down to the Hell of the Earth, breaking down in distances of half-lives and termites.

I feel my fingers across the brick, the tempered pieces holding back the tests of rain and wind. Holding in the insectae, the pupae of evolving beasts cowering in the cold of the hidden side. Bugs that fuck and birth until something is born different and better. Something to reign.

I walk around puddles now. All the breakdown means more than anti-freeze and dust. It’s skin, it’s polymers. The Age of Rot Resistance, one and all. What burns will burn as rain, what doesn’t will know ancestors of the next keepers.

Something shifts in the day and I finger the trigger. Turn everything into sound, wait and hear and decipher the Morse code of the dead. All that’s left now is hands and guns, and sex is both. The sound passes, the moment gone, and I put her back to sleep in my pocket.

The glass goes to sound, spraying the floor. Again I listen and then I step. A crowd of cigarettes watches, a pool of tickets and gum. Like most now the air inside is damp with things rotting and growing. Expiration dates like lame jokes. Shelves hiding abandoned nests, room corners made of animal shit and seed husks. I get behind the counter and collect foods. Beef jerky and pistachios first, the proteins, and then the breads and such.

When I bend down footsteps shuffle-step past the store. I sweat pills and canned fishes. A sour smell moves through the hairs and sinuses and I wait seven full before I even scratch. Ten and I move, onto the bottled water and beer. The pack feels better now, heavier but not excessive because pounds equal seconds when you’re running hard.

All this because the Fire Realm didn’t want me.

cRickets

The book of vanishing people said: "His story started with bones," as the avenues of Manhattan collapsed into flooded subway tunnels and turned back into rivers. Rivers the otters could reclaim.

Speaking of such a thing, the woman smiled and said: "My bones are going to Hell in a handcart." Her body-frame light with laughter and degenerative loss in swiss cheese and honeycomb patterns.

And a Father, sitting in a cabin, preferred the sound of shifting wood to the voice of his wife.