Laying there in the dust I saw a thousand burnt contrails weaving a tangle of thread contexts around the city. Echoes rolled across the sky followed by innumerable tiny neon pods snapping on like tracers flying up the four lane expressways. Between these I watched gangs of red silk gas bags struggling to hoist shining advertisements from the newly painted beams of fresh faced tea shops. I looked down at the crawling skin of the hill to where olive and emerald became prune, ochre, and brick and the skin began to shake violently with the smoky heat.
Cicadas crept into my shirt and wired me into the organic communications grid and I could hear the city singing an evensong that more than bent the truth. I listened but I couldn't hear a single voice say one intelligible word. The whole thing poured up at me in a wave of white noise over the beat of the insect mating call and the swing of the knife grass.
The light was going out. I could see an irrepressibly dense smog wiping out whole blocks. Incandescence fled before the dark but it was caught. The voice of the city roared and then I couldn't see the bamboo above me for the black...