Twelve minutes before midnight. The grand old clock in the spire didn\u2019t 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 \u2013 salty, amber-yellow, and smelling faintly of ozone and forgotten sunny days.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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. \u201cDid you hear?\u201d<\/em> someone\u2019s shadow whispered from the stone wall, though the mouth that owned it had already vanished around the corner.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I stepped into the puddle of light. It didn\u2019t 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Twelve minutes before midnight. The grand old clock in the spire didn\u2019t 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 my coat pocket for a cigarette but pulled out a handful of wet pumpkin seeds instead \u2013 salty, amber-yellow, and smelling faintly of ozone and forgotten sunny days.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":3480,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[64],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3479","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-experimental-prose"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/eurolit.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3479","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/eurolit.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/eurolit.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eurolit.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eurolit.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3479"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/eurolit.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3479\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3558,"href":"https:\/\/eurolit.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3479\/revisions\/3558"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eurolit.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3480"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/eurolit.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3479"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eurolit.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3479"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eurolit.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3479"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}