Post by andyg on May 6, 2016 19:53:27 GMT
Definitely a challenging one this week. Here's a garbage flash piece from me:
Old Jack's Aria
Hitching a lift on a northbound train, Jack pays off a rail guard with a blunt and a story and a hungry laugh. Scranton, soon, will vanish into his past as Jack walks from car to car, hunting for a vacant chair to nap. A spot is found and his limbs sound a faint crack upon his fall. This railcar is almost full, but his frail body’s aria warrants no affirmation.
I’m out, Jack thinks. Moonlight falls on across Scranton’s roadways. Out for good.
Tourists fill vacant chairs and sit with laptops and iPads and contraptions that Jack still cannot fathom. His mind burrows in an old world, lost to today’s clamor. Storms form off to a distant south, a rural south.
Locomotion unabating, his railcar follows its path to Albany. Jack waits. His window fogs—Rorschach wisps of ballooning fractals. Lights within distant buildings blur and dim and pass out of sight.
Jack sits back and waits for daylight to fill up his cart, to warm his cold body. But a chill forms, a growing cold, a cold with fangs.
A sharp pain disrupts his thoughts. It starts as a throb and discomfort, but gradually swallows his mind.
A bodily pain, a sharp spasm in his gut. Air is difficult to trap and hold in lungs. But his coughs disturb nobody.
His world dims on this northbound train, with Albany but a rock’s throw away.
“I’m having,” Jack says, pounding his chair’s hard plastic with a fist. “...an attack.”
His words call to vacant chairs; isolation shrouds his final words.
“No,” Jack says. “Not now.”
Old Jack's Aria
Hitching a lift on a northbound train, Jack pays off a rail guard with a blunt and a story and a hungry laugh. Scranton, soon, will vanish into his past as Jack walks from car to car, hunting for a vacant chair to nap. A spot is found and his limbs sound a faint crack upon his fall. This railcar is almost full, but his frail body’s aria warrants no affirmation.
I’m out, Jack thinks. Moonlight falls on across Scranton’s roadways. Out for good.
Tourists fill vacant chairs and sit with laptops and iPads and contraptions that Jack still cannot fathom. His mind burrows in an old world, lost to today’s clamor. Storms form off to a distant south, a rural south.
Locomotion unabating, his railcar follows its path to Albany. Jack waits. His window fogs—Rorschach wisps of ballooning fractals. Lights within distant buildings blur and dim and pass out of sight.
Jack sits back and waits for daylight to fill up his cart, to warm his cold body. But a chill forms, a growing cold, a cold with fangs.
A sharp pain disrupts his thoughts. It starts as a throb and discomfort, but gradually swallows his mind.
A bodily pain, a sharp spasm in his gut. Air is difficult to trap and hold in lungs. But his coughs disturb nobody.
His world dims on this northbound train, with Albany but a rock’s throw away.
“I’m having,” Jack says, pounding his chair’s hard plastic with a fist. “...an attack.”
His words call to vacant chairs; isolation shrouds his final words.
“No,” Jack says. “Not now.”