Lately there had been too many accidents. Street against street, plaza roped and marked, voices stuttered about public space and the rewriting of conditions. Beyond a sudden turn, or backed against a laser system, electric currents shot with a momentary stagger, apart from where faces leaned across tables, grasping for a common thought.
Roles in the production pyramid exchanged anecdotes about what had happened on weekends. They’d heard this or that before, claims to insight expelled with propulsive force across the space of a body locked into its usual deepening grooves, except where a slice was misplaced, or protests cheered in the mud for a new totem with reverberations that backed against poles. Maneuvers learned to trick the trade or trade the trick or utter a clarification three stops past the last stop, leashed to a time-bound coded familiar, while competing bandwidths invented ways to look for love without commitment to believing even the first word.
–Mark Wallace, author of The Quarry and the Lot
