Twelve minutes before midnight. The grand old clock in the spire didn’t tick. The sound was a heavy thudding resonance, like a munch. The mechanism swallowed the seconds whole, leaving behind a gelatinous silence that pooled around my ears. I reached into a side pocket for the cigarettes but pulled out a handful of wet pumpkin seeds instead – salty, amber-yellow, and smelling faintly of ozone and forgotten sunny days.
Outside, the streetlights were haemorrhaging. Thick amber dripped from the glass housings, pooling on the asphalt to reflect a sky that had long forgotten its blue, settling instead for the sickly, bruised purple of a dead television screen. People walked past, their features smeared like charcoal drawings left out in the rain, leaving heavy, stagnant trails of conversation behind them. “Did you hear?” someone’s shadow whispered from the stone wall, though the mouth that owned it had already vanished around the corner.
I stepped into the puddle of light. It didn’t splash; it hummed, as if the glow had a throat. The brightness climbed my ankles and rewrote my shoes, dissolving leather into semantics, then into verbs, until I was no longer walking but merely conjugating myself across the pavement. The city wasn’t built of brick or steel, but of syntax, a typographical error waiting for a giant thumb to press backspace. I closed my eyes. The seeds in my pocket grew warm.
