Heat Wave

This town doesn't have humidity. We have this continual pollution factor that's liquid the way coagulating blood is liquid. It fills the air and fucks up breathability, visibility and sanity. Smog, smoke, dust, exhaust, dirt, sand, debris, chemicals. The air here has texture, flavor, complexity. Inhaling in this town is more than just respiration... it's Russian Roulette with periodic table of the elements.

On bad days, they tell children and old people to stay inside. Why? For fear of their lungs exploding I imagine. Or maybe because there's a paranoia of a race of mutants spawning at bus stops. They even recommend masks that can help filter out the larger particles. It's a dry heat, but it's a dry, toxic vapor of death that doesn't cause as much discomfort as a swamp, but will actually strip off two layers of dermis when the breeze picks up.

It's like a shield, keeping out fresh air, rain, and happiness. It's a dry heat. Much like a nuclear wind.

8:43 a.m., Westbound on ***** Avenue (Rorschach Up)

Dead cat on the road to work, today. Bloated from gasses inside, tabby-stripes looked like big lines of smeared mascara. Meat baking on the asphalt, food for the hungry gutters of a feral city. Victims of her parasitic, internal-combustion spawn.


I hate seeing dead cats on the road, or dead dogs, or any of the animals routinely preyed upon by the freeways and streets. Cars, not wolves or pumas or even hunting tribes of men with dark skin are the modern predators. Steel and plastic and glass sharks trolling the black lanes, with empty human minds guiding them. They kill without caring and warning. Only the growl of the engine, the primal screeching of tires and the rhythmic, ceremonial sounds of music vibrating through the windshield is there to even acknowledge their predation.


The bodies melt on the streets under a desert sun turned violent by the concrete and iron and shards of brown bottle scattered like seeds on the sidewalks and parking lots. I often wonder what is growing from it all, what phantom non-vegetation creeping from the cracks, creeping vines of metropolitan entropy grown strong on the diet of festering meat, anxiety and blackened air.


I offer up silent words for the souls of the dead, fed the city so it might continue to thrive in the sands and the sun. Not a prayer, more an invocation. How long before It eats the rest of us?


At night you can smell her, feel her shifting. The sounds echo across endless miles of hard, constructed surfaces. The wind blows, and this sweet, rotted and musky scent drifts on the air. Not human, not animal. It smells of diesel exhaust and putrid water, sweat and stale beer, burnt rubber and cheap perfume, despair and dried blood.


I see visions of the hordes dead cats and dogs, coyotes, legions of crushed cockroaches and dessicated scorpions rising forth like mottled tide of scuttling vengeance. It consumes everything in its wake, a geophage, scouring this flesh, cleansing like terrestial maggots.


And this… is what happens when I give up caffeine.