2.8.07

The Broken News

It's hot, isn't it? Oppressively? Maybe it was tired. Maybe it was, maybe it was a forty year old man, strong as a boulder, with modernist nosebones artificially straightened after a bad accident, a fall or something. His ears just started sprouting like this tiny moss who get their water from the cracks in the concrete.

That's why they were out there anyway, in the heat and sun, for those tufts of fur, that's why, out in the heat and sun, out in the two right lanes they hammered and chopped. They were tearing up the old man's drippy and balding scalp. They were inserting plugs, jamming rebar ferns into his head to improve him and all he was was he was tired. They couldn't make him not tired. They couldn't give him a good night of sleep he never had. They couldn't buff him clean and they couldn't slow down just a minute and look over his edge at the view of the river the only fucking thing he had to be proud of. Except during rush hour, except when they had to look and look directly at another river. If nobody ever wrote no books, it would just be water molecules shoving other, slower molecules out of the way, another natural phenomenon, and not so fucking special. The bridge noticed when he was depressed, when they were all on his back, when he was worried that somebody else was looking at it all, at the world, looking the same way he did.

Until he didn't. The last minute: He knew he would break. He felt his knee slip and his kneecap did something to his leg bone. It was slight, a fingertip on a first date, something like a graze but that's too violent, it was gentler, like raspy or wispy or flit but not those at all either. It was probably his cartilage. We'll have to wait for another media update, but I'll put my money down. It was there yesterday like a paper shim. When he was a kid, not yet a bridge, but a runner, a fleet-feeted promise, he got asked how he ran like that, how his legs knew not to push off but grasp ahead, onto the next square of cement sidewalk or meter of track like a cartoon spider. His answer, he never gave it, it was lots of shucks and modesty because that's what an interview it, but his answer was He was smarter, and He was Grace. Out there, his knees were pivots in midair, circling erotically and twisting for new angles to gain inches on those competitor-legs and his legs weren't the same stiff and straight ones everybody else carried, they were curved, like tusks, and bending. One day, his tusks and pivots and angles weren't worth a damn anymore. One day, sheer physicality overwhelmed him and everybody else could flat-out run, but when he lost, he was still proud and sometime he smiled for no reason.

It was not there today, not like a paper shim. He was proud, until this morning when he cried, when he heard the rasp, the wisp, and the flitting, and when he fell.

He didn't even try to get up. They would be disappointed in him anyway. There wasn't an excuse in the world for him, there were kids up there for christsake and it was rush hour and it made it all easier but it was worse, too. Why couldn't he fall at midnight, when only a few drunks and careless Toyotas would have dropped into the river, fucking because it wouldn't have been worth it! It wouldn't have done any damage would it, and you would have called me an accident when now I am tragedy, I am Catastrof, now somebody's got to look at a bridge and be scared to drive on it, somebody's got to look in the water and they won't laugh about the drought weakened majesty of the Mississipp Molecules, sitting at some nine-odd feet. They're going to see fragility, ours and yours, and then they'll see sharp fucking rocks and no more mundane, now every step is going to be the future spread out, a terrifying limbo between you, the wasteful fucks, and them, the world of outdoors and danger and collapse, Listen up! He fell, he didn't trip, stop talking injuries and molecules, he fucking fell down, on his face and he stayed down there and he fucking drowned, just so you would notice.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

You know about the heroes? Men and women. In general. Certainly not a stupid bridge. Maybe sometimes it's rock stars. If Rollins had been there, he would have held the bridge and given it a monologue about neo-misogynistic feminism and BUSH IS FAIL and we all would have been in joy together.

Anonymous said...

The odds of finding survivors are slim, but where's your glib response? I had a thousand, but I bit my tongue both ways because I worried about a Van Laeg-or two dropping into the sea. But now you didn't and work is over and it's all not topical anymore. It's too fast, this next millennium, too fast to sit inside and make money when you should be out blogging, letting the world in on your thoughts, oh life, life, now too fast for a five hour shift!

Anonymous said...

Urgent UPDATE: The morning after, at work, almost everyone could have been on the bridge, 10 or 20 or 30 minutes or a few days back I too was on the bridge and it could have happened then, but oh oh oh eight, oh oh oh one, oh oh oh seven, never forget!

Anonymous said...

Atlas Pissed

krs10 said...

*clapping wildly*

Anonymous said...

I say them pray, and then... out of nowhere... everybody died.

Anonymous said...

saw.

Anonymous said...

"But daddy, IIIIIIIII want my own 9.11."

"Well..."

"Daddy!!! I Want it Nowwwwwwwwwwwwwewewew!"

"All right dear. I'll see If I can pull some strings down at the office."

"Daddy! I love you so much."

"Me Too."

Aaron said...

2 seewn?