A red-faced man in a leather jacket clumsily eats a mango with two hands, forcing the fruit into his mouth, seemingly pressing it into his teeth. I was going into the decimated part of the city, or that is the part of the city that no longer existed or existed but as a forced imprint, representation in its lack, like the shadows sealed. The red-faced man kept looking at me as he smashed the fruit into his closed teeth. He wanted to tell me about the topology of redress and white scorn he had years worth of pickled bruises and internalized bait, fermented into defensive immunological appetitive mannerisms, half whispers and self-caresses fogging up the space between him and the blank mass of it all pressing greatly against him. An officer crept up like a blemish anointed with rage and malignancies. Reaching for his gun, he asked to see everyone’s tickets. The officer with a thick neck and furrowed brows approaches a black woman in a yellow sweatshirt and eyes to kind to be the eyes of an American, she asks for a moment while she searchers through her purse and the officer wraps her wrist with a zip tie and throws her face into the front back of the seat opposing her; the officer does this with such speed that the woman had always been zip tied.

-Bread and Land-

Knotted in a pose of tethered mutuality, each weaved too deeply for any possible escape. I knew the ivy and the junction box spitting cords could not live, not as each grew like that, as they were. In a way it was impossible to distinguish parts of colored cords, blue, purple, green and pink, between the twisting lengths of desperate city ivy all tendriled. A pastiche of healthy arboreous roots or ventricle blood tracks. Diagrams of nervous, cybernetic and economic systems as depicted in Herbert L Mumford’s detailed book “the wrapped earth a discourse on international and sub-oceanic communication system network cables and the emergent constellations of para-governmental and governmental corporate satellites.”

The envelope needed to be delivered. Its texture began to soften with palm sweat. I stand at a precipice, staring down at the rails and cords, a confounding system, a mangled nest resembling exposed nerves or exhumed roots. A deep resonant sound emanates from everywhere yet nowhere all at once, a sound that fills the space with a palpable trembling. I look at my watch to find the batteries have died, the delicate hands stopped at 4:52.

The dialogue of station birds, sunset colored finches and ash colored doves, gripping wires or the steel vectors, the industrial framework of the ceiling, a matrix. The birds confused or rather in admonishment,  whistle out tones of clustered doom, stunned paralyzed coos, lamenting the absurdity of this crude and pornographic environment, trees and vines that lack fruit or dew and the mindless dust. My watch had stopped at 4:52. It was not 4:52, though it was some other time, exactly what time it was, I was not sure, but knew instinctively it was not 4:52.

“I have a fever.” Speaking muffled one hand over the receiver, like a kidnapper demanding ransom.

“A Fever?”

“Yes. I won’t be making it in today. Will you please let….”

“A Fever?” The voice said on the other line, an unfamiliar voice that sounded distant and tinny. Distant laughter or the recorded wailing of a studio audience clouding the sound coming through the speaker.

“Are you near a television?”

“What?”

“A Television?” covering one ear, the sound of the recorded laughter growing more intense in volume. “Nevermind, just let Jerry know I won’t be in today due to a fever.”

“A fever?” The woman  said, before the line cut to a roaring sea of static. Burst of light spilled into the caboose, sun flashing between the passing buildings. For a moment, the domed roof of the sky seems to arch forever, craning above the melting city line, vanishing into the milky infinite distance.

A red-faced man in a leather jacket clumsily eats a mango with two hands, forcing the fruit into his mouth, seemingly pressing it into his teeth. I was going into the decimated part of the city, or that is the part of the city that no longer existed or existed but as a forced imprint, representation in its lack, like the shadows sealed. The red-faced man kept looking at me as he smashed the fruit into his closed teeth. He wanted to tell me about the topology of redress and white scorn he had years worth of pickled bruises and internalized bait, fermented into defensive immunological appetitive mannerisms, half whispers and self-caresses fogging up the space between him and the blank mass of it all pressing greatly against him. An officer crept up like a blemish anointed with rage and malignancies. Reaching for his gun, he asked to see everyone’s tickets. The officer with a thick neck and furrowed brows approaches a black woman in a yellow sweatshirt and eyes to kind to be the eyes of an American, she asks for a moment while she searchers through her purse and the officer wraps her wrist with a zip tie and throws her face into the front back of the seat opposing her; the officer does this with such speed that the woman had always been zip tied.

The officer moved his hands with such speed that history’s seams fell open. He reached like a surgeon’s gloved hand into the medically induced gash, inserting trauma deep into the caverns. A surgeon in reverse. Deftly and with perfect grammar, placing the tumor onto the glistening lymph nodes, attaching with fastidious care, his fingers slim and precise, a piano player in another life. Before the train stops, they are gone. An adjunct professor with round glasses, two bearded men in rain slickers, a group of five or seven men in white pressed shirts and pleated slacks, and a red-haired child all see but don’t see the woman in the yellow sweater be pulled from the train, they don’t see this mostly and in the span of time it takes them to accept they don’t see it they have moved on, looking down into screens or at the ribbed rubber floor abacused with bits and crumbs of buttered cookies, chemically red corn chips, foam crusted pebbles of bread, nearly petrified raisins, scatterings of loose change, pennies and dimes not yet found by the wandering fingers of those without homes, fingers propelled by inherent motion like blind insects stumbling in the dirt and moss. Others looked out windows into the smearing of all that was left. I got off at the last station and walked for a few blocks.

Yahoo Answers

A leak of government documents, or that is several maps and charts, had been given to the media by an unknown, though actually perhaps a very well-known source. Known though only in the way in which the operative codes can be known to the suited men, held in air-conditioned bunkers whose aged hands continually shift documents, bits of their skin cells caressing the sheets of paper, halfway dreaming of beds dressed by young sex workers, hushed in tones of soundproof walls. These maps detail the sacrificial zones, areas of major cities and some less significant. Areas partitioned off and exported to the war front.