Del Shannon inserted the A into the title before he sang his song and, once sung, sung again. And as Phoebe remembered the grooves of the disc flattening onto the revolving mat having fallen from the height of the autochanger’s elbow, she already hummed the organ’s solo interlude. Phoebe herself was the ultimate runaway, she felt, as she watched a simulation of an aircraft on the screen, a futuristic vehicle about to leave its own earthen grooves for the open skies. She threw herself open to the projection of self into a cockpit specially designed for those pilots who had not been taught how to control the dashboard properly. To be responsible for those souls aboard was a thought too far, as she shrunk back into her head, but any means of dispersal or, as they said in other places, diaspora, justified the ends. A dying planet was a dying planet, no getting away from it, she thought.
As the runway eventually formed its own vanishing-point perspective, she visualised rail tracks on either side, between which the river of airflows slowly became thermals and eventually buoyancy. But the rail tracks were real even if she wasn’t. There was a drag she couldn’t account for, and she remembered the crowds that had crammed into the seats in the hull behind her. Small boats were as nothing to this now spluttering beast she needed to tame. Time to withdraw from the simulation, before she found herself trapped. Shrieks behind her echoing the constant “Why… why-why-why-why-why” of the engines.
Phoebe examined the autochange arm closely and imagined it as a close-up photograph of something artistically unrecognisable. Its bent elbow was now blurred like an unsightly floater in the eye, becoming a configuration much like an A. And the music was the all screaming, all shrieking organ solo and no singing.
(written today)
As the runway eventually formed its own vanishing-point perspective, she visualised rail tracks on either side, between which the river of airflows slowly became thermals and eventually buoyancy. But the rail tracks were real even if she wasn’t. There was a drag she couldn’t account for, and she remembered the crowds that had crammed into the seats in the hull behind her. Small boats were as nothing to this now spluttering beast she needed to tame. Time to withdraw from the simulation, before she found herself trapped. Shrieks behind her echoing the constant “Why… why-why-why-why-why” of the engines.
Phoebe examined the autochange arm closely and imagined it as a close-up photograph of something artistically unrecognisable. Its bent elbow was now blurred like an unsightly floater in the eye, becoming a configuration much like an A. And the music was the all screaming, all shrieking organ solo and no singing.
(written today)