i n

F

BIGGER

SMALLER

COURIER

GEORGIA

TIMES

VERDANA

COMIC

l

RECENT

POPULAR

e

u

 ^{(it's beta!)}

Wine dark and bitter black. I don’t know, I just see the asterisk on your shirt. An invisible tail of romping static follows closely behind you. I don’t see it, I just feel the aura you exude. Rabbit ears jut from the top of your head, gleaming white in the sun, blaring matte in the clouds. I don’t care, I just want you to exist.

“Things on a very small scale behave like nothing that you have any direct experience about.”

You quote Feynman and Whatshisname as if they were actors in a movie you liked.

But you don’t. You don’t have to because the people around you, the places around you, the satellites around you, the galaxies around you know exactly what you mean. Light comes to you in only certain size quantities, in particles. You gather everything up, like the happy foliage on earth, and manage to remain metastable indefinitely.

Buildings of interception stomp about in every direction, cracking the pavement and making the whitewash asphalt grin curly, dark smiles. You hang your head and marvel at a glitter between your feet. Once I see that, I want nothing more of the world, of the universe than to be that glittering speck. I’m trapped in the line absorption spectra, though. I’m part of the missing wavelength your vision will probably never experience.

Rusty raindrops hit your pristine rabbit ears, tinting the metal a temporary orange as they stick. You lift your chin a bit, causing the drops clinging to lose their grip and roll down the antennae. Some fall reluctantly to the ground and I want to weep for their loss. You tilt your head sideways, peering through the heavy tarnish of the fog to the dampened plaster wall I’m leaning against (these buildings want to crumble but the yellowed glass windows won’t let them). I have an asterisk on my shirt.

Diffraction hesitates because each colour has its own characteristic wavelength. You hesitate because some of me has polarized light during its pass. I’m imperfectly imperceptible.

“Everybody sees what you appear to be; few make out what you really are.”

At that exact moment, I realise I’m within a building. I’ve been absorbed because of the photoelectric effect that overcame me when I happened into your vision. You built the building around me. Sounds of static snap at the last lines of Machiavelli as I stare through a glass darkly, enlightened by the spectrum of sound.

I don’t exist. I don’t feel. I don’t see an asterisk. Wine dark and bitter black envelope my lack of self-consciousness as you tread the city of oscillating concrete and dusty electromagnetic sunsets.