Jury Duty

Sailing The Painted Gliders by Bill

I sat down on a stone bench. I thought of laying right on the ground, imagining wetness out of the earth pushing up around me instead of hard concrete against my shoulder blades all the ballooning sections around my middle. Helen wandered off and we could hear her for a while pushing buttons on a console for information. I thought about offering to take some pictures of Melanie and Hank, but they probably would have taken me up on it and I really didn’t want to risk dropping my camera. I guess we expected rocks to stack, but there were none. Rather they were already done, already stacked. Made to look solid like it wasn't ready to fall over in the full course of time. The building was saturated with existence belying time. All the buildings, the whole city, thick and full and immobile with constant motion. Then one day it will all settle back down into the muck, push up more mud, wait, push down and push up again. Eventually the whole city will be a swamp again we might wander through if we choose to wait long enough. All the moisture will pull the heavy stone down into itself, using the weight of itself and its sheer mass to rise up again. What a city is, a swamp can be to, and what a city does a swamp matches just as well.

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Decisions by Alan

Above us all only truth and sky. And if truth is sky, then is it endless? Does it stretch and bend into the nothing that is infinity? And if our understanding of infinity is limited, is truth a compartment in which we store our nothing?

We ‘re on line for jury duty today. My lies and me. We walk into a building made of sky and the proportions outlast us. A man with a gun for an arm directs us to disassemble. There are tourniquets pinned to the wall for emergency use only. The crowd waits to be named. The waiting is a pillar.

When we’re called, it’s a choice to run or not. We will dash the fastest in this race. Take the liberty and press it firmly against the face and run to river and liftoff in grace one final jump, which will not be final but obsolete save for the few breaths of fresh air and the imagined sequence of wings.

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Guilty by Lyle

Call it a placeholder. We find dogs to feed on the perimeter. We eat dog at night around the fires in barrels when we can no longer stand the sound of our own hypocrisy. Shorthand. What's shorter than guilty? We all know that one.