Sunset at Third Beach

Tattered Fragments of an Obsolete Map

He was wandering lost in a dusk darkened city. The streets seemed to join at subtly wrong angles like the builder’s didn’t have anything to make a proper ninety degree angle and just kind of guessed at it. Dust and dirt collected in the gutters and corners. That particular sediment of newspaper shredded soaked by the rain devolving back into pulp and reforming tone shapes, a windblown papier-mâché.

Nothing seemed to be open. Rolled down storm shutters with urban hieroglyphs layered over each other until the blend and blur of colours and unreadable patterns formed a chaotic psychedelic mandala imprinting his brain with the streets’ program, hacking his mind through that sensitive exposed terminal, the open port of his optic nerve and he could feel the pressure of it on the back of his skull, his forebrain long since despaired of decoding this world linguistically. The tags, the strata of grime, the patterns of pigeon shit on the cracked and uneven sidewalks… these were what was telling him where to go and he gave his body over to the city’s voice in that fugue state of exhaustion and desperation.

The eerie soundlessness gave way to the far distant noises of car traffic. Occasionally now he saw people but they were like the newsprint, discarded and weathered in the gutters and corners. He left them to slumber on their cardboard and sleeping bags and for now they left him alone. He didn’t imagine that he looked like he had enough money to be worth approaching anyways. He was sure he looked like he’d spent a week sleeping on greyhounds, eating vending machine food, drinking redbulls and smoking, which is what he’d been up to. At that thought he fished a smoke out of the crumpled red and white pack in his back pocket and a small black bic out of another pocket, lighting it with one long deep breath. The tar and nicotine helping him ignore the emptiness of his stomach.