Post Urbem

      You are back at the edge of the curb, where it drops into the street. How often has this curb rasped under the rippled pattern of your shoe sole? Only now do you look at it and appreciate its continuity throughout the city. The curb is an animal, incessantly sloughing off layers of rain-weakened fleisch. The curb is the gate at which you must halt before every street crossing. So much depends on parlance with curbs. 

     No, you decide. Enough of this city. One cannot last in the urban environment with a Sight such as this. 

     Within a week, you empty your bank account to rent a car, which you pick up at the airport. Without packing a bag or deciding upon a certain route, you get onto the interstate and head south. But, before long, the interstates prove themselves to be too capital; they bear too great an allegiance to the cities, and may try to funnel you into one. The state highway proves slightly less malicious, and is happy to send you out into the evaporating thickets of the heartland. 

     After eight hours of constant driving, you pull into the parking lot of a Love's at the Tennessee-Alabama border. Accomplishing a string of menial, necessary tasks in order to stay on the road, you come back out to your rental car and stand there for a moment, surveying the environs.

     It occurs to you that you may be in danger as long as you carry this Sight and this Mind. You will continue to be observed by some remote agent who records and dramatizes your movements, your affect, and your revelations. There is a way to throw him off of your trail. Like so many others, you must leave behind a document - a condensation of the Sight-Mind on a shred of paper, which you can then cast aside into the parking lot as the new point of scrutiny. 

     The document reads as follows:

"This was one of those 'updated' roadside refuges - the kind of place with variegated stone mosaic walls that are somehow already begrimed with atomized offal in the bathrooms. Love's is the trucker's stop of choice for obvious reasons. In the pisser: mysterious, passionate fusion jazz piped in through an unseen, unnoticed loudspeaker, intermittently disrupted by an automated voice informing 'customer 13' and 'customer 52' that their showers are ready. The urinals contain at least the past six hours' worth of unflushed piss, nearly orange for how deep the yellow be. Standing here at the outskirts of the parking lot: a couple of flattened bones, gnawed by possums and warped from merciless solar exposure; broken ends of PVC pipe emerging from a bank of grass that slopes up from the... curb; an abandoned olive-green shirt that disappears into the roughage; a mildly collapsing Capri Sun box; two partially drained generic plastic water bottles..."