In a City of the Future
A reference, an allusion, some kind of sharp detail of their time together. She expected she would appear in his writing eventually.
The letter, she opened. It had gone out to ten thousand people. She had no way to know that was it (the number) but that’s how it felt, the bolded bar in her inbox.
Sum Game.
All the ways she could attribute such a lazy and allusive title to their sex life, their arguments, an everlasting inability to agree who should cover what bill when, when they could have split them.
She said aloud, A dog better not bite a waiter in this one.
But that isn’t what happened. A strange vine began growing in a city of the future. A grey black city where the skyscrapers went into the pollution. Characters used words like pollution. Everyone was talking about pollution and the governmente (why an -e?) in this city.
How embarrassing. Will I be the CEO of MajorCorp? Why does no one have any real imagination about the future anymore?
There were flying cars. And though everything had “shifted to solar” and you thought the world would be able to finally breathe, the pollution was instead building because of an off-gas from the sun-wiring which he never explained.
Will there be a kitchen knife, she asked. Some final battle with eggs. Flour.
No. In the end the vine spread into the wet alleys and flying car garages and blossomed bright yellow flowers and no one opposed this god Progress, no “bad guys” only the meter maids which he didn’t develop in any particular way. The vine just greens the city and that’s basically it.
And yet I know this is about me.