steam

This is the thing:

I’ve started noticing the stuff beneath everything - the guts of things - the gurgling, stinking innards that keep the world going.

Most of us just swan about on the surface, lost in the seamlessness of burnished chrome.

But the owls are everywhere, if you know where to look.

They leer out with their space ghost eyes from the hot, dark corners of the machinery.

The dead are here too, of course – all their generations jack-knifed into the soft, brown earth of the steaming fields.

Whenever I breathe, my lungs fill up with their withered cells.

Clouds of them falling from the air like cinnamon, dusting the dinner on my plate, hiding in the creases of my knuckles.

They need to go home as much as I do. The sun no longer cares. The moon – it's given up.