Webby

      Dust: an inimitable dust in your lungs. It is a sort of particulate so fine and dense that it forbids you from coughing. You just stand there on the corner, instead, watching a glowing, red pointillist hand, awaiting the appearance of a glowing, white pointillist man.

     The heavenly vault over the square is disintegrating into strata of rescinded sun shades: an unstirred Thai iced tea that leaves its beads of condensation on your face and neck. You don't know why you have come here, to the granite pedestal of this soaring ionic column, atop which perches a craven and eyeless eagle with petrified, voluptuous wings. But, certainly, you felt the urge to come precisely here, where the earth seems to be sagging (not literally, but in an implied sense) under the column's unquantifiable presence. At this hour, you find that several people are content to walk around the fringes of the square, where there are clattering cafés and boulangeries with their breath of toasted sugar. But none of those remote perambulant beings seem willing to simplify their path by cutting through the square, treading this stiff grass so pregnant with roots.

     "Webby," you hear, uttered from the column's stone center. "My webby."

     Ten minutes earlier, you were standing on an elevated train platform, doing your best to follow the lines of a book, written in a tongue not native to you; it was a collection of short stories written by a short man with sunken, frozen eyes and a name that sounds like the biological smell of gangrenous lips. But you were stunned out of your page scansion by a meek black man brushing past you; he had almost smeared himself on you. You looked up and stared to find him muttering violent curses, eyes hitched to a spot just a few degrees removed from where you stood. You wouldn't drop your eyes (you hate the world and its distractions), which only made the man draw his upper lip even further off of his teeth: dim nubs of raw dentin, clinging to the membranes anchoring them to his gums. On his lips, there was a coagulated sort of putty - the product of seared, sloughing skin and dehydrated saliva.

     The man tried to hide behind a steel-and-glass partition, but you continued to bore into him with your eyes through coin-sized holes cut into the metal. Past layers of abraded plexiglass, you watched him grow progressively more animated, lunging and ducking in a maniac bid to evade your sight. For some reason, you finally decided to look back down at your book. You managed to latch onto a random line, which took on the following erroneous translation in your mind:

"The folk inside were dark, careful, pockets filled with knives, walking alone on the balls of their feet and uttering filth with circumspection."

     And it was then that your random harasser rushed toward you, almost losing his balance as he halted inches from your face.

     "What is that BOOK?!"

     You made no attempt to reestablish a distance between him and yourself.

     "It's called These Things Tend to Happen."  

     Your thumb found the catch on the blade in your pocket.

     "Oh... It's good?"

     Suddenly, the man went very still, the tension in his shoulders slackening. You softened, too, and removed your hand from your pocket so that you could show him the blank book cover's foreign title, shimmering in its barely visible silver paint. He didn't even look at the book.

     "You goin' to work?" the man asked you.

     "...In a sense, yes."

     "Oh, okay. Well... you do your very best today."

     The day was already all but over. Yet when he extended his fist out to you for a bump, you obliged him. This gesture suddenly gave you an early-morning feeling.

     "Hey, look..." you said, "I hope you understand. It's nothing personal. I just don't like it when people get close like that. I'm the kind to keep an eye out."

     "Oh, you don't need to be worried. Ain't nobody out to get you. I'm a nice man.

     With these words, he turned off  to the side, his face becoming a flat profile. You noticed that the eye on the facing half of his visage was closer to its corresponding ear than it was to his nose, giving him the look of an ashen fish. With that one eye, he continued to hold you. The both of you passed a moment in silence until the train pulled up. As it neared, the man pointed at it, as if concerned that it would escape your notice.

     You considered whether his pointing was an attempt to get you to look away from him. With mild regret, accompanied by an Anglo-Saxon resolve, you placed your hand back into your pocket and walked side-by-side with him to the train car door. 

     Once inside, you took the nearest available seat (few were occupied - certainly none in your immediate vicinity). You turned your body toward the aisle as your interlocutor walked past, prepared to continue the dialogue. But the thought seemed not to have crossed his mind; he nestled himself down in the jump seat at the end of the cabin by the door communicating with the next car over, having lost all interest in you.

     It was only once you were arriving at your desired station that you noticed a terse, poisonous odor, a smell not native to you. Casting about for its source, you found that the piscine man from the platform was sucking on a stubby glass tube, flicking a lighter beneath it. The fumes - something like acetone mingled with rotten apricots - were immediately burning the upper anterooms of your lungs; you could almost feel the pollutive cloud dividing itself and entering each damp pulmonary pocket before releasing a fallout of miniscule, solid debris. The man stood up and struggled toward the door as the brake system pacified the train's barreling inertia.

     He sensed you scrutinizing him and his blackened glass pipe, which he twirled in his fingers, complacently examining its every surface as if it were something other than what it was. He couldn't wait to exit onto the polished macadam of this underground platform, and burst through the doors when they opened.

     You staggered out in his wake, veins dilating, vision blurring, influenced by the invisible ghost exhaled from those torn custard lips. On the escalator, you began to hear the man's voice, almost as it had sounded when he had first spoken to you. Only, this time, his tone was much more intimate, addressing you like an age-old friend, or like a soul giving an indifferent account of itself on Judgment Day.

     "Webby. My webby. Sure, I can tell you why I call it that. My dad kept it locked up in a cabinet in the den. I don't know why he took the trouble to lock it up, though. Anybody coulda jes' smashed the glass and took it out. My mom used to sit me on the sofa right by it before bedtime and read me a story, like Charlotte's Web. And I would jes' sit, drinking my cocoa and listening to the story, and it was behind that glass, gathering cobwebs. And as my mom read on, I would hear her words, but all I could picture in my head was what that thing would do when the right guy came along, knowin' what to do with it. And you know how, in Charlotte's Web, the spider cain't talk - its only way of communicatin' to the pig is by writing words in its web? Well, it took me a few times hearing the story to realize this, but that don't make no sense. Ain't no damn pig can read words... But it's the farmers that end up reading Charlotte's web  and findin' out that they what they got on their hands is 'some pig.' Didn't matter what happened in the story, though, 'cause the webs there weren't the cobwebs in the cabinet in the den. And so, the last thing: I broke the glass one day. I took it out and I knew what to do with it from the instructions. My dad came stormin' in the room, mad as hell, and I shucked him one. Looked down into his stomach and it was wet and webby. Webby and red. And there's other books besides Charlotte's Web - ancient books, like the Bible, but not only the Bible - where people be readin' all sorts of things that ain't words. Like people readin' intestines. And there's that time the king of Babylon was havin' a feast and a hand came out from behind an invisible veil and wrote something in angel language on the wall that no one there could read. That's where we get that saying, "I can see the writing on the wall." Ain't nothing good written there. But this is all to say that there's webs everywhere. I got my Webby for proof of that."

...

...

...

     Now you stand before the column, staring up along its darkening length at the eagle, who stares down in return. Your heart erratic in your chest, you study the bird's plump, preyless beak. Your hands are empty - you've dropped your book somewhere along the way. Between the eagle's talons and its rain-corroded breast, you convince yourself that you can see a web.

     An erroneous translation of what you read there solidifies in your mind.

     "The writing on the wall."