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":"","_ppma_block_editor_authors":""},"categories":[64],"tags":[],"ppma_author":[579],"class_list":["post-3479","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-experimental-prose"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t