Pegs

The City is not the place for him. There are too many reminders here of what he should be, because the plague of people surrounding him is one which pulses too much. It would have been fine if it had been one continually screaming mass, a constant buzz of pain and pressure, but the lulls (night, a weak powdering of stars) offer a figment of hope which he clutches after.

He walks the City during these periods of respite, observing the treasures which he once saw regularly in the country but now regards as artefacts. He etches the scrunched curves of tree branches onto his brain, thinking that if he were to be lobotomised, the revealed brain would have vine tendrils and ferns and the flight paths of swallows snaking alongside his blood vessels. His now-tarmaced paths are heavy, too solid and steady for the [something something] of his [something something].

But in the other times, during the assorted thuds and screams and reverberating clangs of metal against metal and stone and various other materials which he knew existed but had forgotten the names of. Things like that went missing sometimes, jamming square pegs into a hole which wasn’t really a hole designed for ramming pegs into but is a manhole cover or the end of a gutter or a small tube of penne pasta or—

He has now decided that, perhaps, he will start walking during the daytime. He thinks that it will help him to see more clearly.