A day off. A day to go walking in the park; a day to be at large in this place – listening to the sounds of the city that everyone else tuned out. To him it was ambient tunes, the true heartbeat of industrial; he built symphonies out of simple rhythms, found chord progressions where others heard dissonance. He had bumped into people on a fairly regular frequency on this particular walk – becoming absorbed in what he thought may have been an harmonic offshoot of the stream that he had been following his whole life.
When people looked at him they didn’t see what was there – they saw what they wanted to see. He supposed that was true of anyone and everyone if you stopped to consider it, but perhaps he felt it more because he got to see shit that he wouldn’t have been privy to if his skin had been as dark as it might have been if he hadn’t looked more like his mother than his father.
Good job he was self reliant and didn’t really need the opinions of anyone to make him feel good about himself. There was very little anchoring him here apart from the songline; apart from the ragged vestige of the dreaming he had chased all the way out here. It wasn’t as simple as knowing where to look either – he had been forced to go on walkabout several times to find dropped threads and seemingly hidden notes. Whoever it was that wanted him to eventually have this revelation they were making him work damned hard to get anywhere near it.
Still, it wasn’t such a bad way to spend your time – engrossed in things that in the everyday you might have just walked past and never noticed. He was never bored – he always had something that he could be doing and he was sure that because he was looking he saw more beauty than anyone he knew.
Filed under: 5th Floor, Part 1, Rad, fifth floor, room 56, update | Tagged: 16 Flaws, 5th Floor, Depth Heights, fiction, fifth floor, literature, paul grimsley, prose, Rad, room 56, serial, sixteen flaws, skull cull, story, tale, walkabout, writer, writing
