IV

The streets are writhing with life. Merchants and beggars and shoe shiners. Con men and law men and men walking in aimless circles. Pigeons and rats jealousy eyeing the produce stalls from the shadows, but not making the effort to remain hidden. Gambling halls, bordellos, and opium joints ready and littering the streets for any jack looking for a wholesome time on a day off.

There are also souls like myself pushing through the crowd. Souls who navigate the streets and trek along the cracked cobble stones towards the hill at the edge of town. That is where the factory towers above everything and watches us with its paternal affection. Benevolently it belches plumes of black and green and purple smoke from its many stacks and oozes a viscid discharge into the stream.

The hue of this discharge cannot be described as easily as the smoke. Much like the ancients had no word for “blue” and had to settle on “wine-dark” as a description of the sea’s color. I must attempt the same abstraction to describe that thickish semiliquid that seeped out of the pipes. Perhaps “hate-bright” or “cloudy-piss-solumn’ or “itchy-perineum-neon”...no, none of these are wrong, but none provides enough information to elucidate the experience…

You know the color you see when you close your eyes after staring into the sun? I imagine it's the color that you would see if you were to stare into the opposite of the sun, but only if you were stoned, and only if that anti-sun hated you personally.