Seeker, pt. 2
The second installment of my summer short story™
July 2026
He finds the overpasses the way graces appear in a city that never texts back: by accident, which is to say, to start getting lost, used to being lost until one night, the road has risen and he with it, up above and the light sprawl of spider web concrete, a man-poured mausoleum of fractals that say the world is generous with space and indifferent to bodies inside it. Pull over, the radio station DJ says and here he stands at the railing, his eyes funneling down the keyhole gaps of the lanes below and the cars snaking with such mechanical regularity, it couldn’t be true. Does any body roving under him feel his glare?
The overpasses were alarming when he first got here because the roads were flat where he’s from and generally, known quantities, two lanes in each direction and a stoplight every half mile with geography that makes no demands on you and isn’t easy on the eyes either, nothing of scale, but here—here, the infrastructure stacks itself, one road over another over another, handshake piles of safety, and the sourface is bleached bone and its scale is purely inhuman and sterile, not entirely alienating, and whoosh, the world washes over him as a small being inside an enormous entity, the self a brief and mercifully irrelevant gasp.
The first rock catches the headlight, then tailight of a passing car. It’s just there near the railing when his eyes focus outward again, an aggregate piece like him edged out of the rock somewhere along the way of a thousand bodies passing by and none to notice, and its weight is a comfort, needing no effort and still not crumbling to grit, and he holds the jagged rectangle in the oval center of right palm, his left having dropped it there for safe care, when he extends his arm from his chest straight toward the lights beyond his knuckles, turns his upward facing palm to the earth and one by one by one by one, a finger unfurls.
The lamp’s always on
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