I have seen this city glisten like a tarted up whore stepping into a bitter-cold night. I have seen her lines blur, and I have seen her with a clarity unknown to the gods. She’s a crustacean, or a thick-skinned alligator, unchanged for thousands of years; persisting against time and evolution though hate and greed and the unyielding permanence of her construction.

She doesn’t see you. She doesn’t smell or touch or taste you, but her heart pumps a thousand maggots just like you. Pressurized into her veins.

One time she saw me. One time all the ageless fire in her eyes was directed right at me, and with infinite glee she raised her hand of glass and steel and smacked me back down where she thought I belonged.

Now I tread these streets only so much as dirt can tread the dirt beneath it. I read somewhere that concrete doesn’t age, it solidifies, so I join the strata underneath her gray heel just like any other fuck, thinking “one day, you looked at me,” and lusting like a madman for the day she’d see me again.