Smoke Eight

By the time I get back to the flat it’s dark. My PCB’s almost powered up. Only old Cherries and Devomail anyway, including that missive, the Arts letter. Flicking through the softcopy as fresh wireless data chugs through the air,…

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Smoke Seven

At about 5pm I take the umbrella out again and walk down to the markets in my rubber boots, sloshing through the sudden laneway cascades, thinking of our new house. I’m trying to remember what it looked like on the…

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Smoke Six

After testing that the thermal pulse has also been connected, I affix our little coffee exploder to the burner, and very soon I’m sipping the speedy brown stuff, looking at the boxes on the door/table in the loungeroom, their wooden…

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Smoke Five

At 9am the crates arrive, secure and solid packed, eight of them in all, one for each room, with two more for the loungeroom. The delivery scanner nods briefly when I open the screen door to him, and we unpallet…

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Smoke Four

A small patio shelters one half of the small garden from the rain and sun, the white posts of its supports ringed by vines of an almost glowing green. I remember the smooth concrete floor and the warm blue walls…

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Smoke Three

‘Aramis is still in the dark’. ‘Aramis is in the planning stages of streetlight-facilitation’, they say in the planning podcasts. It manufactures its own leaves. Beneath the dike, under the glow of the eave-lights, I reach Blvd. 2, Apartment 109…

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Smoke Two

On the platform at Aramis Underground I’m hit by a blast of hot air and steam as an intercity maglev lumbers out, bound for Avalon and the western Metropoles. I notice more platform hawkers here than on my first visit,…

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Smoke One

I closed the door on our empty house for the last time, leaving the detritus of rental space – the video cards and home-delivery pizza menus, the old school telephone directories in yellow and white, sensor mood lights and triple…

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