Orbit
This is a modified version of a (very) short story from How To Be Happy (Vol. 1, Iss. 1), for the purposes of entering a competition.
Orbit.
Driving out of the city, the buildings shrink, lower, flatten and stretch away from each other in the shimmering heat like kids sprawled around a rippling pool. The people here are more aimless, move slower, and you wonder if they live longer, through the flat blank days. In packing yards, men linger motionless in the angular shadows cast by semi-trailers and warehouses, hands unconsciously at their foreheads to shelter from the sun. Even the sky seems somehow more distant. Company names fade along the vast warehouses in lettering so big you can only read them from perspectives across adjacent fields, carparks. Moving across the surface, you feel vaguely threatened, as if the looming structures conceal forces too large and close to see, like giant lettering, signs too close to read.
The sea distant off to the side lies flat and brooding and looks dirty like the sky, as if the roadside dust leaks everywhere. You pass kids walking directionless along backwater roads who look up darkly, as if asking questions—Gonna give me something to do, today, huh?. Boredom in the blood making any action arousing, any passing car a chance for heat and violence and the passing of time.
She might be dead, is the thought, lingering. Might be simply a body lying on a floor, by now. In any case not answering her phone, which is reason enough to worry, reason enough to leave the concrete shade of the city to venture across the dun planes, a fish leaving the reef edge to float uncertainly over the unknown depths.
You arrive in a crust of sweat and dirt, adapted to the environment, already feeling the weariness in every surface. She lies face up on the floor, sun streaming in through uncovered windows, radio screaming static. A white film covers her empty eyes, and you can see her breathing, shallow. Looking at her, you feel the movement of souls orbiting the city in the wind, as if the city is the centre of a spiritual gravity that absorbs some and spits out others like so much debris, out past the dirty sea, across the horizon. You imagine her as a child facing outwards across the planes as the city drew her inwards, seeing a horizon of possibilities and choices scattered like jewels across the desert, her orbit gradually tightening, and then snapping, just like that, folding her into herself, possibilities collapsing, shooting fire down into her soul. Then just as suddenly spat out, eyes glazed, skidding across the outskirts, like one of those messes of dry brush you see flitting across the highways at night, messes that for a moment look solid, but after a while you learn you can just run right over them.
You stand there and imagine her orbit, straightening now, slowing. Her eyes are opening slowly and you can tell she doesn’t know where she is. You think: Under a different interpretation, she has always been a straight line, shrinking, down, to a point.