Text by Kyla Jolene. Paintings by Fran Williams.
Stuck—no, participating :)—in the polychromatic traffic jam of Pure Life, on their way to the Dream of the Window where a prism of Total Eye translates the Everything into little words. And it has everything, just like the menu of a 24 hour diner, where hungry people sit at the bar and read World News, their faces always changing, the clock above the ATM has 9 billion second hands and so it appears as a black, unmoving circle.
I usually order a cup of water, which evaporates immediately on account of all the light.
The Dream of the Window is always at some bullseye, center-of-the-earth coordinate and every millisecond is New Years, and worlds that were once made of fireworks leave their shape in ashes on the sky. Another pop, another window, Blink and it Just Keeps Happening. The Total Eye never blinks and yet the frame is built and the dream continues, and cross sections of the traffic jam are collected in order, yes right this way, cajoled to the window, a slice of refraction pie—they have it at the diner, always fresh, you can smell it from everywhere.
The 9 billion clawing hands scramble for a bite, a superhighway of teeth and tires and blood. They rip at each other's always-changing faces and push through the wet flesh back into the traffic jam, hooked on the promise of the Dream—to be born and nailed to a perfect place—each one stamping the next one out, until every page of the flip-book is seen at the same time and the light is hot and blinding and then it cracks open, spitting pieces of itself across the landscape which is now just teeming with individual cars and smiles and pieces of arms and the bent lines that are used to build letters and words. Giant, animal-eyed forces animate the light. Within the dissonance is a harmony, a feeling like planet earth is a chain of Single Places, a 24 hour diner in the heart of a 24 hour diner, in the heart of a traffic jam, from which it can be seen, the smeared face of an angel looking out at you from the Window of everyone’s car.
