Letters jigged
like courier-style spiders across the screen, furling, unfurling, and
occasionally colliding with one another. Norman squinted at his phone,
unsuccessfully parsing meaning while walking briskly down the deserted
sidewalk. This website was poorly optimized for mobile viewing. Yet the story
was about Ijinga. He’d heard of Ijinga before—certainly he had, in news
reports, or overheard in conversation. It was a city of international concern.
A skittering W’s legs fell off, crashing
into an unaware A on the line below, and their wreckage created something that
resembled the Volkswagen logo. That was the focal point of failure around which
everything then swirled. Textual whirlpool. It wasn’t that the language was too
dense; it was written by the hard-hitting, equity-minded pen of Lara Folsman,
for god’s sake. She knew how to communicate with anyone. She’d been to Ijinga.
In the next section a lonesome B’s
sideways lumps slid off, leaving an even more lonesome I, a lopsided m, and a
thoroughly indecipherable word on the page. Norman turned onto Kinsit street.
It was a long affair of smooth brick tenements in whose windows not a single
person stood overlooking. That was the proper reading environment. But the sun
darkened, or moved behind the cloudscape, or was covered by clouds moving over
it. In any case, Norman could no longer make out his screen, no matter how
close he held it to his face. So he took the turn onto Belliphany street.
Lowriders ran a train down the center
lane, choo-chooing in the sharp tongue of the internal combustion engine. From
every window a man hung, and from every man an arm extended, and from each arm
a hand held a fruit snack aloft. The men slid their offerings across Norman’s
furrowed brow. “Care for a sweet?” each asked, as they passed.
No, but nothing ever happened on Belliphany. None of the
lawns were strewn with toys and not a single tree bent sideways under the
terrible burden of a tire swing. But the light was strong. Norman scrolled
further down the page, trying to ingest as much as possible before he turned
onto Fourth avenue. Few people lived there, and even fewer would admit to it.
The point of the thing was to connect to Housan, a task at which nobody could
argue it did not succeed. Norman trekked backwards. He tried to catch the place
he’d left off, or at least train his eyes to distinguish the tiny and unevenly
spaced letters, but by the time he caught Ijinga in all the mess his feet
brought him into the glaring sunlight of Feddick boulevard. Now how had he come
there?
A typewriter jangled on the breeze,
soaring here and there across the sky, catching updrafts, depositing B’s and
W’s into the clouds like some bookish aunt’s holiday cookies, cut from an
infinite roll of billowing grey dough. Nobody stood on the roofs of their apartment
complexes, or gathered in the tens of thousands outside of the local elementary
school, or— Norman pressed his nose against the screen—or something, or
something, he thought, he bet.
Devils were in the details and details were described by
the words and the words were constructed of letters, so the letters were
important to read, he knew, or at least he hoped to know soon, zig-zagging a
pattern as though his feet were a kitten unspooling a pack of dried ham. Down
one way the sun dipped. Up the other it rose even and gold. He doubled back,
circled around, crossed over, and passed between. Like any other city, perhaps
even like Ijinga, this one eventually ran short of houses, gas stations, and
warehouses. Like any article, this one eventually came to a close. But he could
not read it.
Haywan street ran out of town—a straight
shot to the old processing plant. Every step Norman took down its length was a
step on the ball of the sun, pushing it lower in the sky, but when he turned
around he found that every step in the other direction was exactly the same.
The sun, apparently determined to set, would be reasoned with by neither kick
nor step, and such was equally the case with the road. At its start it looped
back onto its end, and at its end it circled right back around to its start.
Never did it return to Gelwert, the avenue from which he had originally
accessed it, nor did it ever deposit him at the plant. The sun perpetually
rimmed the horizon.
After enduring several loops of this,
Norman wandered off into the short clipped grass on the median of eternal
Haywan, where dirt sponged under his feet and the sun arched back to its right
and proper place. After a time he came upon a cliff overlooking a city. There
was something familiar to the lay of it, but he couldn’t place what it might
be. Something tingling in the back of his mind.
Z. T. Gwynn is a writer of weird fiction and perpetually unfinished poetry. His other work has appeared in Five on the Fifth and Reflex Press. You can follow him on Twitter @gwynn_z
