Wind & Automatic
By Peter Anderson
Wind
Words were strewn everywhere when we woke up. They lay like dead branches on front lawns up and down the block. Was that a letter K sticking upside down in the boulevard? An O or a Q had dented the cab of our neighbor’s red truck. We’d heard the noise while we were sleeping but thought it had been a marching band, or radial tires whispering in the rain, or that guy who walks back and forth all day on the Drive humming snatches of opera in a register too low to hear. But it was none of these. And now this incomprehensible mess, this tangled alphabet. A greeting gone wrong. Neighbors gathered on the sidewalk, pocketing the odd syllable and talking about the poorer neighborhoods, the ones too poor to be called neighborhoods. Apparently some of them had been swept clean of language. In one of those jokes the weather likes to play, their potholed streets were now spotless, blank. The gleaming white expanse of a page welcoming the opening words of a letter. How are you? Hope this finds you well. Above our heads a single sheet of paper hovered like a bird blown off course by the wind.
Automatic
It’s happening below us, down in the basement. The hum of the machinery whispering to us. Pipes, screws, valves, pumps of bone, skin, and cartilage. Networks of veins spread across the night’s waters, catching fish that light up the dark. It’s going on without us, all of it. Motion sensors, sleepwalkers trying to find the door, zombies looking for after-hour deals, warehouses of expired produce, driverless forklifts. We can’t make out what the whispers are trying to tell us but maybe one day we will. Until then, it’s someone else’s pen recording these thoughts, someone else’s thoughts. It’s someone else, always someone else. Your shoes are empty but they still make their rounds and suddenly there you are wondering how you got here, and why the basement’s flooded.
Poet, playwright and performer Peter Anderson is a graduate of the University of Michigan and the Dell’Arte School of Physical Theatre now living in Vancouver, Canada. His work has appeared in Refractions: Solo, The Perfect Piece, Another Perfect Piece, Playing the Pacific Province, The Periodical Lunch and the RC Alumni Journal. His plays are available online through the Canadian Play Outlet.