Emily Peterson Crespo
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She had auburn hair & bangs and wore the little floral dresses that say free spirited, but her lanyard and her business end said she was only there for coffee & appearances. Her companion was shorter with little glasses & clean poufy upswept hair, terse mouth, and pant suits. They worked for Dangerzone as I liked to call him, the lobbyist who was 400 lbs and a walking widowmaker heart attack. They’d come up the bar for coffee and play their routine. Auburn said “What about her?” And Pouf said with a shake of her head,” No everyone knows everything about her life.” See Auburn was an orphan & well, the thing about Dangerzone is he needed to own you. It’s easy to catch on to these things behind a bar with a fish bowl of the same fish swimming in and out for years.
By Emily Peterson Crespo5 years ago in Poets
Monger of 11.78
Monger of 11.78 The room tinkled in the light pouring down the center of the hexagonal tunnel. The proprietress did look up slantwise from behind her curtain of black and silver hair from her perch down in the chains to see the man enter. Her tunnel of wares hung three levels down the center of the mercantile block. Her neighbor to the left hunkered in his cage and sold lamps made apparently of twine glued to twisted plastic and lit with a variety of yellowed-light low-wattage emission bulbs. To the right was silk handkerchiefs and scarves and bolts of color. Just above her was the sound of liquid and oxygen bubbles, but you’d have to enter into the space further to know what Pax Lumini was selling. All around the hexagon was the possibility of experiencing or purchasing something. It was possible to enter on a wheelchair or on foot, and descend through the shop receiving information available on items directly to the screen you carried, or wore, or on the edge of the lift device. Hen wanted only one thing. He felt he would know it when he saw it. The way to ask her was unclear to him. He could only surmise her. Her role in the matter of exchange was possibly to purchase items from afar, or hang them in her choice of visual display. Hen unfolded and folded his arms, then took a deep breath as he mounted the lift pad and moved through her tunnel of metallic and crystal ornamentation. His calves were solidly rooted but his eyes darted out in furtive expectation. Her arms seemed to pause with purpled iridescent tips in the frames she kept around her skin. He tried to memorize the artifacts devoid of broadcast details revealing on his screen. Her blue antique typewriter did not connect, but the orchids lit with a grow-light did, and the tiny drawers with neat hardware labels that lined her walls were behind heavy encryption. Her eyes however seemed to recognize him completely, and simply avoided forming a memory. He felt that she must know that this was day 413 of his moments knowing she existed without crossing over that divide and inviting any deeper retrospective. Outside the glass walls he plummeted past, the rivulets and rings of green blurred. He descended expertly to the bottom of the vertical mall, and exited as if coming to a stop at the bottom of a ski slope. He felt the rush of chemistry that tugged his heart and then his hands; sometimes one and sometimes the other. This sensation he had come to know only when moving through past her was more powerful than anything he’d ever known. It was section 3.28. The whole area was commercial, surrounded by pits of fire and trash in steel crucibles and ceramic chute-manifolds that de-natured any toxins as the smoke rose, so that inside the city wall there was actually a verdant labyrinthine landscaping obscuring the pits and smoke, leading to a triple ring of water that was filled with lilies and quietly leaping fish. There were mostly employees that took up the apartments handily that hung from the great arches of the sector with long gravity elevators that endless moved on silent tracks. He imagined she lived there. Exiting the mall ground-level, he bought some vanilla ice cream from the sweets cart that was always parked outside. This was his favorite five minutes of every day. He’d recorded the sounds, and recreated the entire descent to play at home in sector 11.78, using the old bone-grid names for what was once two hundred miles of desolation. Pretty soon the foot traffic thinned. Almost done with the work day.
By Emily Peterson Crespo5 years ago in Futurism
