At some point they must leave through this door. There is only one way out.

With the blunt end of a half-burnt stick or stone, I have begun writing in ash trails. I have written on the free space of the letter to my landlord and on the deconstructed envelope, but I ran out of room. I am writing a book. The non-room has a store of somehow unburnt magazines found under a large slab of greyness. There is a television in the corner, the image is blurred and the screen is cracked. A celebrity spiritual medium is telling a story about a leper colony to a talk show host. I write in small ash letters onto the glossy pages. When the shortest man, or Todd, or the man in the hazmat suit exits through the glass door, I will stealthily follow behind them. I have held each stone of grey and each has a weight.

November and that algebraic wind. Half speeches of feckless leach bearers, early not to void, to push into the air, each day they wipe clean the streets, tear down the tarpaulin stretched roofs, and the huddles of cardboard beds, the concrete sprayed with high-pressure hoses, sunsetless cells, a dream to die a janitor or leathered and droughted on the asphalt roof of an aging county commissioner, to want to be dragged in the foxhole, what forces push them there, slick greased tongue of facsimile hexes, gorgonized caste. I finger my last five-dollar bill. It’s paper softly manipulative and shapeless in the linted pocket of my jeans.  

The cashier looks at me blankly. There are other things on her mind. I wonder if they are hiring, but see no signs or flyers indicating help is needed. It’s not hard to tell the cashier wishes she was not here, she is wishing she was anywhere but here, there is a scale playing in her mind the weights of options, or directions that seem like options but are only the structural lines of the closed loop, the futility of this scale and practice she dually understands. This process of thought is a tool to separate oneself from the whole of it all, of which we are so repressively tethered to, and that with each tremor or hint of movement the cord is pulled and the other end is justled, manipulated in jagged capricious lengths. Her dark skin had been made lighter by the ash covering it. The color under her nails a deep wet soil, pressed in soot. She had been searching for something before. Shifters. They come to the sites or more so the non-sites and drag the mindless dust and ash, running handfuls through screen or mesh, or lifting edges of hard gray lumps of things unknown as if looking for insects or hidden keys, or pile the things in structures that at first glance appear spiritual, some bring bags and fill them with gray objects hulling them home--sisyphean figures. I once saw a woman bring a broom and sweep for hours though nothing changed, ash grey sameness. Nothing is ever found.

Taking the letter out I read its contents, reading as if I had not written it, attempting to assume the position of the landlord. Closing my eyes, I could see the yawing horizon fading, as I stood at the window of a skyrise office, a view that in its pedestrian familiarity takes on a homogenized and feckless shape, it could be anywhere, any number of cities, everything nearly drawing dismantled, frozen inverted childhood turrets baring commercial acids, repeatedly bronzed fluids, entropy and heat death, the billboard advertising intravenously administered birth control, a low-flying plane.

An alcove hides me. Perhaps, an alcove is the wrong word, as it is more what remains of a dilapidated room, an office or small studio. I am surrounded by the ash gray sameness. Three walls and the hill of unknown debris obscuring my position. I can see across the street (looking from one zone into the next), the orbital chandelier or a segment of its glare held in the glass of the entry door. A collection of stones (grey objects of unknown origin, bricks, crumbled foundation, torsos, things hardened in death,) large enough to break a skull, I have held them each and can feel the weight.

At some point they must leave through this door. There is only one way out.

With the blunt end of a half-burnt stick or stone, I have begun writing in ash trails. I have written on the free space of the letter to my landlord and on the deconstructed envelope, but I ran out of room. I am writing a book. The non-room has a store of somehow unburnt magazines found under a large slab of greyness. There is a television in the corner, the image is blurred and the screen is cracked. A celebrity spiritual medium is telling a story about a leper colony to a talk show host. I write in small ash letters onto the glossy pages. When the shortest man, or Todd, or the man in the hazmat suit exits through the glass door, I will stealthily follow behind them. I have held each stone of grey and each has a weight.