Hello, I'm Not Here Right Now

The end of an experimental novel written in spite after the tragic theft of the only existing copy of the, by far more superior version, on the very day I finished it. Based on a true story.

   When the light of day's veneer is almost worn through to the membrane of night, people coincidentally reveal their hidden side. Taking sideways looks, lengthened by the incoming darkness's onslaught, to flee it's appearance, some run, as if walking, to escape the bell's striking, lurching themselves forward when any bus enters their view, hoping it is theirs. Breaking the meditative state of bus shelter contemplation, (which has given the world so much), and its apparent effect upon the speed that time passes.

Office freed slaves press their accelerators with controlled abandon as excessively as their masters' reprimands are remembered to show some ears who's really boss now, sucking on an overpriced petrol station lollipop marketed with kids as targets, any hint of embarrassment rinsed over by the night.

One school holiday girl says,

"We never do what we're going to."

No more ideas, please. Here we can talk to ourselves. (Who ever else, really?) Like an answer falling from the office building's crossword page puzzle of yesterday’s newspaper windows comforted for the impact with Lower Ground with the way-out to home sliding metal doors by the bell sounding Round One from an indeterminable place, until the cleaner turns off the lights and blackens the last row of crossword squares and the towers are silent replicas of their daylight counterparts in the stillness of a city at night, like a single blank sheet of white copying paper (that will never be marked) sliding from a chute in a malfunctioning photocopier when no one notices, into the recycling bin, a.w.o.l.

The new day, like the next, yanked out from a typewriter's roller by an angry fist, devoid of text.

   At dawn, in a house on the outskirts of town where the funnels blow and the factories stand huddled like inexorable warriors, splitting the day into two twelve hour halves, a man is found, with the 'Yellow Pages' open at 'Pizza Delivery'.

He's using it as a pillow, outstretched in the corridor, telephone receiver in hand, its cord fully stretched taut like some castaway shipwreck victim on a beach of hallway carpet, in a coma of salami and anchovy seaweed brine, reaching across those suburbs to signal the midnight pizza delivery rescue man who is trapped by a mozzarella squid's tentacles of static, failed connection, busy signal.

   This asphyxiated survivor, with his arm extended toward the salvation of the sauce bottle, on the dry crumb sand, pizza crust beach, beyond the flying tidal wave calamity of fast food illusion, starvation in the cold grey dawn, as the factory's steam whistle summons the rising eyes of marching, half-dead slaves and gives away its free heat, blasting a steam cloud uselessly into the freezing air, for no one, except the boss's desire, and in the hallway, in his futile grip, the headset is still audibly bleating, the fatality of the engaged signal, in broken strips.

Please, leave your message after the tone...