a long time coming

It was late at night. The hour at which taxis alone, taxis and stragglers, and early early-morning wakebirds mistakebirds, ride the streets. Mostly just taxis.

Character was listless relentless lackluster all over some stupid parkbench, tackling his fear of the dark by playing into its hands. Outside dark was easier to deal with than inside dark, in any case. He drifted in and out of being tired, watching the flicking lights slide by. 485-8585. There's always someone who needs to get somewhere, somewhere. He zigged/zagged through markets and demands bullshit. Gravity was bearish. He was a blow-up float in his own tickertape parade. 7 3/4. 7 1/2. Somewhere in there was his apartment. His concept of home was so fractured nowadays. The costs rose, slowly, steadily, like taxi meters. His wallet was dead and stuffed with empty. He hummed

i did my best, it wasn't much.
i couldn't feel, so i learned to touch.

Across the street, the lamppost bathed him in a sickly light. i've told the truth, i didn't come all this way to fool you. Somehow, there must have been a gap between the glass and the metal,
yeah even though it all went wrong, i'll stand right here before the lord of Song, flies had obviously gotten in.

Their dead corpses, wings and not much else, of course he thought, who needs rationality when you can fly, perhaps this is the logic behind the non-invention of flying cars, had pooled together into a crocodilian sort of face. It shed no tears but light.

Oh to be so great. A long thin metal tail, and jaws composed of decaying mandibles. He was sweaty. with nothing on my lips but hallelujah.

He was in the mood, he realized, for something. Were he but a newcomer to this town, he shuffled, he might ask a taxi driver to take him, "downtown, where all the action is at" or some such nonsense but he wasn't really smart enough to play that dumb. Thoughts fluttered at him like moths, clustering and flustering his naked, cluttered, random body. As they alit, wings aflitter, they fried. His rashness stood out against the darkness and to it they came. He wanted eightballs, highballs, speedballs, powerballs. He wanted handholding maintenant. Harder better faster stronger. He started singing again, getting up and measuredly falling eastwards, though how quickly he could not tell. you say i took the name in vain. i don't even know then name, but if i did, well, really, what's it to you?

there's a blaze of light in ever word, he gasped for breath, it doesn't matter which you heard, the holy or the broken hallelujah.

In earlier years he might have felt sorry for the crocodile-mouth dead flies, but this was before he moved into the apartment. This was, he supposed, one of the pitfalls of shopping for a place, it's difficult to encounter all the possible problems that might arise living somewhere in a quarter-hour. One such possible problem was the existence of very large houseflies. He no longer trusted dark spots unless he was wearing his glasses. Frequently they would start to move. They were easy enough to kill; their continued existence brought out a sort of animal rage in the roommates, and a repeated banging of something papery, light and yet — they didn't get the newspaper, which Character sometimes regretted during scrambles to find appropriate weaponry, although the BestBuy flyers that always seemed to clog up their mailbox made decent enough substitutes — heavy and worthless enough to use for fly-killing, against a wall. There was always blood. So far as they could tell the flies did not bite or sting but they did bleed. Parts of Harry knew this was only to make the roommates feel guilty for their dirty deeds. The blood raised them up, made them human. Unsurprising, then, that they were so maddening in their refusal to disappear entirely. And so whack whack whack whack you goddamn motherfucker whack the roommates lost their sympathy for various families of Insectidae — not that they were particularly fond of them to begin with, of course.

And like this, wholly unsteadily, he made his way across the fourfivesix a.m. streets, as grey as the pavement he walked and twice as cracked. He was looking for a fix.

Overhead, the sun unfurled, heavenly, westward, though, how quickly, he could not tell.