The Intersection (Micro Fiction)
The dream kept happening, over and over. The first time it struck him as significant and he thought it must hold some deep meaning but he soon forgot about it. Then it happened again. And again…
He walked out into the intersection against traffic. It was a busy metropolitan intersection during peak hours, jammed with bizarre cars and trucks and buses that looked like they were all designed by the great madman, Dr Seuss. They were honking and zipping around, all fighting for their position in the race. The traffic lights did their best to direct the flow: their reliable steady pulse, cycling through yellow green red was the only thing keeping the city from falling into total chaos. The people were self governing only within the limits of the rules that they had developed for the whole, and the rulers of the streets were the traffic lights.
He waited for a moment at the edge of the curb, watching it all flow past, no it surged past, it felt aggressive and angry. He looked up and noticed for the first time there were far too many wires running above the street, connecting this to that in a crisscross anti-pattern that felt like a tell tale sign of the madness of city development; years and years of bad planning built on top of bad planning. I never noticed how bad it was before, the man thought.
The air was thick with exhaust and although technically unbreathable, the people were all breathing it in as if it were totally normal. In addition to being heavy with fumes and dust, it was electrified with radio and wifi waves and the buzz of wires. The whine of engines, the squeal of breaks, the screaming of car horns was deafening. With such a wall of noise, no one could hear the anguished cries of the forgotten souls coming from the alleyways and steam vents.
He stood there at the intersection, with his toes right at the edge of the curb. and watched all this power converge and grind down to a point of concentrated friction that seemed about to explode. Red light. Green light. Yellow light red. If anything went against this high-tension situation it would explode. He imagined a man holding up the world like Atlas, and he was so overburdened and close to the edge of collapse that if a single hair from the blonde head of the woman he loved fell upon his back he would be crushed by the total weight of his load.
He imagined now that he was that hair, and when the electric crosswalk sign turned again to the red don’t walk hand, he walked. He stepped out into traffic with his arms held up, palms out against the cars. NO, YOU STOP! There was a terrible roar of angry machines screaming at him. A man laid on his horn continuously while he screamed with rage out his window. The car grew in size and the mans head became very big and his voice was thunderous like that of the Gods. “GET THE FUCK OUT OF THE FCUKING STREET YOU FUCKING FUCK!! The giant head at the end of a long stretchy neck screamed down upon him as he defiantly walked into a hornets nest of city traffic.
All the lights turned green at once and everything converged down upon this little man who had dared to walk when the sign had instructed him not to. The already strange cars at once transformed into wild creatures. One had long thin legs like spiders and the head of a wolf. They surrounded the man and pressed down on him: they wanted his blood. All at once they darted in and grabbed him by the arms and legs and pulled at him, hopping to dismember him. His flesh was pierced and the blood ran into the intersection, pooled in the well-worn tire tracks and then flowed into a metal drain. HIs body stretched like taffy as the surreal wolf machines tried to pull him apart. The sound of their screams became deafening and blood ran from his ears. He screamed but no sound seemed to come from his mouth.
Hot steam shot from the vents in the streets as the sewers boiled with rage. The nearby buildings vibrated with energy until all the windows shattered at once and rained tiny bits of glass down upon the sidewalks and stuck in the peoples hair. The many crows and pigeons who perched on the wires or flew overhead burst into flames and crash-landed on windshields or fell into the fountain in the main square with a fizzle.
He felt his body being pulled apart but he would not surrender to the dogs. He concentrated all his strength into a point, and he became a ferocious creature that could hold his ground against the attackers. He grew in size, like the big green man form the TV show he watched when he was a boy; He was as tall as an elephant and his muscles were ripped. He broke free of their jaws which tore at his flesh and he flung them away from the intersection. They crashed into buildings and other cars. He took two large spider-dogs with cartoon red eyes and smashed them together as hard as he could. They exploded like bags of marbles and fell into thousands of pieces and rolled away. As he continued to grow in size he reached out in a show of force and grabbed a handful of the overhanging wires and ripped them from the poles like he was tearing the hair from a witches skull. The poles caught fire and burnt in an instant to ashes. He kicked a city bus like a football and it went into a standing spin like it was on a lathe, building speed and then shot off, rolling through a crowd of people in the square reducing them to something like pizza dough.
He raised his arms above him, like a conductor signaling for the climax and all around him the chaos started to move in a spiral around him, quickly picking up speed until he was standing in the eye of a hurricane, and all around him spun the machines and rubbish, the birds and people and their tiny plastic phones all recording videos for social media. He let it all crescendo and then just at the right moment he slammed his arms down and everything slammed to the ground with a thunderous boom that sent a mushroom cloud up into the already darkened sky. Flames cast an orange glow through the thick black smokey air, and for a moment there was total silence.
Nothing moved. No one called out. There were no car horns or people screaming or even birds calling. The only sound was the crackle of flames.
The man shrunk back to his original size now. The red electric hand changed to a green walking figure and he continued in the direction he had been going. He crossed the street and walked a couple blocks away to a coffee shop called The Bean Counter. He entered the shop and approached the counter. A woman with no face greeted him and asked “what can I get ya?”
“I’ll have a mocha, please” he said while he scanned the pastry case. “And one of those shortbread cookies too, please.”
